KoB's 2014 Nightmare Night Spooktacular

Chapters

Zomponies Ate My Neigh-bors!
The Beating Of That Hideous Heart
Sadie-stic!
No Means Nosferatu

Zomponies Ate My Neigh-bors!

Scootaloo rolled around on the floor of the clubhouse, clutching her stomach and wailing in agony.

“I’m dying!” she cried at the top of her lungs.

“You’re not dyin’,” Apple Bloom sighed from where she sat. She was backed into a corner, far removed from where Scootaloo was having her tantrum. She’d learned her lesson to stay away from the excitable little pegasus when she got herself whipped up into a froth like this – the shiner she’d been given courtesy of a carelessly flailing backhoof had seen to that.

“I am dying!” Scootaloo said with grim finality. “How would you know if I wasn’t dying? You’re not a doctor! If you were, you’d have a doctoring Cutie Mark!”

“You’re not dyin’ because nopony ever died from candy deficiency!” Apple Bloom barked angrily. “Except maybe diabetics… but you ain’t diabetic, so you quit that rollin’ around before I get a rope and truss you up like Mister Piggington when he gets into the grain silo! You’re gunna muss up your costume!”

Scootaloo sat up and glared at her friend. “You’re not the boss of me, Apple Lion,” she stated simply. She trotted over to where the hatchet had fallen off her belt and reholstered it, returning her Tin-Woodspony costume to proper order. She checked herself over for any tears in the aluminum foil, but the costume had held up surprisingly well despite her tantrum.

Apple Bloom scowled back and teased out the golden mane of her lion costume. She gave herself a onceover as well, making sure that the butt-flap on her costume was still buttoned. Granny had made it out of an old pair of brown hoofie-pajamas, and the holes for the buttons on the emergency-hatch were a little loose, so the flap kept coming down on her, much to the amusement of her friends.

“Sweetie, you almost finished?” Apple Bloom asked pleadingly of the curtain obscuring the far corner of the clubhouse. Sweetie Belle had set up the curtain as soon as she’d arrived, saying that she wanted her costume to be a surprise. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo hadn’t seen the point, since they were all dressed to a Wizard of Oz theme, and the enormous suitcase Sweetie had said was full of makeup had likewise seemed unnecessary, but they simply shrugged and let their friend have her way.

That had been before sunset, two hours ago.

“Perfection takes time,” Sweetie replied from behind the curtain in a singsong voice.

“It’s just a stupid scarecrow costume!” Scootaloo said with a stomp of her hoof. “We could’ve gone and gotten a real scarecrow from Apple Bloom’s fields, taken it to Twilight, had her bring it to life, gone Trick-or-Treating with it, and been back and half dead from candy poisoning by now!”

“Okay, now hold on a minute there, missy,” Apple Bloom said tersely, rounding about on Scootaloo and frowning. “First you say you’re dyin’ of lack of candy, now you’re sayin’ you can die from too much candy, which is it?”

“Both!” Scootaloo declared smugly. “My candy levels have to remain consistent, not too low and not too high, for me to maintain maximum awesomeness.”

“And you want to exceed that consistent level?”

“Yes! It’s Nightmare Night and I want candy! So much of it that it makes me sick and I die! Candy!” Scootaloo began stomping around the floor, trotting in a circle and shouting with every thudding hoof-fall. “Candy! Candy! Candy! Candy!”

The entire treehouse shook with the force of Scootaloo’s final stomp, which was accompanied by a deep, resounding rumble that echoed off into the distance. Scootaloo stared at her hoof in awe.

“Whoa…” she whispered. “Did I do that?”

“I think it was an earthquake,” Sweetie Belle said from her hiding place.

Apple Bloom went to the clubhouse window and pulled a curtain aside, staring off in the direction of town. The orchard blocked most of her view, but she could still see Twilight’s new castle, the tip of town hall, and the flag on top of Carousel Boutique, over the tops of the trees. She could hear distant screaming coming from the direction of town – a sure sign that Nightmare Night was in full swing. They’d probably already missed Zecora’s retelling of the Nightmare Night legend, but hopefully the party that Twilight and Spike were letting Pinkie Pie throw at the castle would still be raging by the time they got there.

She looked upwards at the clear night sky. For a moment, she thought she saw some sort of flash across the darkness – something like a glimmer of light against glass – but shrugged it off as a reflection on the window.

“Doesn’t look like anythin’ fell over in town,” she said.

“Good, that means that the candy is safe,” Scootaloo said. She turned back to the curtain and stomped a few more times for good measure. “Candy! Candy! Candy!”

“Alright, already!” Sweetie Belle shrieked from behind the curtain. “Geez, I can’t even get five flappin’ minutes to put on my costume!?”

“You’ve been putting on that costume for the last two hours,” Apple Bloom said.

“No, I’ve been getting ready for two hours, the costume only takes five to put on,” Sweetie said. A cloud of chemicals rose into the air above the curtain, accompanied by the sound of a spray can and the bitter chemical stink of hairspray. “I had to do my mane, put on my makeup, iron the costume, pluck my eyebrows...”

Scootaloo and Apple Bloom shared a stunned look at this revelation. They both ran towards the curtain and each took a corner in their mouths. The curtain was yanked away, revealing a stunned Sweetie Belle, who'd obviously just been trying to get a look at her own rear in the mirrored lid of her makeup case.

“What the hay are you wearin’!?” Apple Bloom asked.

“What?” Sweetie asked innocently as she looked down at her costume. She was wearing an elaborate dress in seafoam green, covered in sequins arranged to look like fish scales. The rear of the dress hung off her flanks and curled with some sort of underwire like a fish’s tail. Her mane had been done up with bits of fake seaweed and dyed blue. “Do you think it’s too much? Too little? Should I have used the seashells?”

“What happened to your scarecrow costume?” Scootaloo asked in disbelief.

“Oh, that old thing?” Sweetie asked with a laugh as she turned to gaze at her own reflection. “Rarity saw that ugly costume and insisted on helping me make a new one.”

“We’re supposed to be a team,” Scootaloo said indignantly. “Remember? Wizard of Oz? You picked the theme. I wanted us to be Wonderbolts.”

“Yeah,” Apple Bloom agreed, “and I wanted us to be the Three Stooges.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have made me be the stinky old scarecrow!” Sweetie Belle snapped.

“If you didn’t want to be the scarecrow you should’ve said something before Nightmare Night Night!” Apple Bloom growled through clenched teeth.

“Look, it’s too late for me to change,” Sweetie Belle said as she backed away, holding up her hooves like she was trying to placate a snarling dog. “Let’s just go like this. We’ll tell everypony that we’re characters from a fanfiction – an alternate-universe where the scarecrow was a totally sexy seapony.”

“Sexy?” Apple Bloom repeated with a raised eyebrow. “Is that what this is about? Are you tryin’ to impress Button Mash again?”

Sweetie’s cheeks flushed at the accusation. “No! Shut up! Shut up your stupid mouth!”

Scootaloo rose up on her hind legs and shook her hooves at the ceiling, unleashing a primal shout of frustrated anger. “What! Ever! I don’t care what you’re dressed as anymore, let’s just go!”

Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle shrugged at the outburst and walked to the door. Their little orange plastic, pumpkin-shaped candy buckets sat next to the entrance, grinning cheerfully as they awaited a night of candy collection.

The door flung open, slamming against the wall with a bang that surprised all three fillies. They backpedaled at once, crashing into one another and collapsing to the ground with a trio of grunts.

Spike ran into the clubhouse, wild-eyed and panting. He slammed the door shut and pulled the heavy wooden crate – which normally functioned as a table – in front of the entrance as a barricade before he rounded on the three groaning fillies.

“Are you like them!?” Spike screamed as his voice cracked in a mixture of fear of anger. He was pointing a claw at the three girls intimidatingly and baring his sharp fangs. “So help me Celestia, I will burn you alive if you’re like them!”

“What the hay are you talkin’ about, Spike!?” Apple Bloom shouted as she extricated herself from the pile. She rubbed tenderly at her shoulder, which was throbbing from the awkward spill she’d just taken. “What’s goin’ on!?”

Spike’s anger faded, giving way to relief. He fell to his hands and knees and huffed tiredly.

“Thank Celestia you three are okay…” he whispered.

The three girls watched in confusion as Spike kneeled on the ground, panting like an old dog.

“Okay, you’re spookin’ us, Spike,” Apple Bloom said impatiently.

“Yeah,” Sweetie agreed. “This is a little much for a Nightmare Night prank. You better cut it out or I’m telling Twilight and my sister.”

Spike rushed forward in the blink of an eye. He grasped desperately at Sweetie Belle’s costume, tears in his eyes, and shouted: “They’re dead, Sweetie! Everypony’s dead!”

The three girls stared at him with their jaws agape. The silence hung in the air, thick enough to cut with a knife.

“Shut up,” Scootaloo said sassily. “No frickin’ way. You’re yanking our chains.”

“They’re dead, Scootaloo!” Spike shouted back.

“Fluttershy?” she asked cautiously.

“Dead!”

“Pinkie Pie?”

“Dead!”

“Rainbow Dash?”

“Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! They’re all dead!”

Sweetie pushed Spike away and smoothed out the wrinkles in her costume. “This seriously isn’t funny.”

“I agree,” Apple Bloom said with a nod as she walked to the front door. “Pinkie and Rainbow probably put you up to this and it sure as sugar ain’t funny. I’m gunna go tell my sister on you, and she’ll tell Twilight, and then you’re in for a world of hurt, mister.”

“Don’t go out there!” Spike pleaded.

“And why the hay not?” she asked, setting down on her rear and placing her hooves on her hips in challenge. “You give me one good reason why I shouldn’t go out this door.”

“Because…” he muttered as he cast his gaze downward sadly. “Because they’re not just dead… they’re… they’re zombies…”

Apple Bloom let out a sharp bark of sarcastic laughter. “I reckon that settles it then. The world is doomed, it’s all over and we’re goin’ to have to live in this treehouse until we die.”

She got back to her hooves and placed her shoulder against the crate blocking the door, moving it aside with a small grunt of effort. She may have been small, but being an earth pony and growing up on a farm made her plenty strong enough to move a wooden crate.

She threw open the door and came face to face with the rotten, shambling corpse of Ditzy Doo, the silly mailmare that everypony in town affectionately called Derpy. Her wonky eye was cloudy and bloodshot, the iris a dead, milky-white that spoke of the empty vessel her mind had become. Blood oozed from her coat in places where she had obvious bite wounds, and a clump of her mane hung from a dangling flap of scalp that appeared to have been half-torn away. She blinked lifelessly, out of some pointless reflex, before opening her mouth widely to moan with hunger pains that eerily mirrored the sounds Scootaloo had been making earlier over candy.

Apple Bloom slammed the door shut, quickly replaced the barricade, and turned back to the rest of the group. She stared at them in slack-jawed horror, her coat now white as a sheet, and shouted: “The world is doomed, it’s all over and we’re goin’ to have to live in this treehouse until we die!”

“It can’t be!” Sweetie said defiantly, shaking as she tried to ignore the moaning and the rhythmic beating of a rotting hoof against the door. “That can’t have been a zombie!”

“Are you sure!?” Scootaloo asked hotly as she ran around the room slamming the storm shutters closed and locking the windows. “That chick looked pretty zombie to me! That sure as hay wasn’t no costume!”

“Maybe she’s just sick…” Sweetie countered lamely. “We don’t know for sure that she was a zombie.”

“She was a zombie, alright,” Spike said confidently.

“How do you know?” Sweetie asked.

“Because a bunch of ponies that looked just like that tried to eat me back in town,” he explained calmly. “They’re zombies and I’ve got the bites to prove it.”

Sweetie and Apple Bloom watched in shock as Scootaloo drew the hatchet from her side and leapt forward, her wings fluttering violently as she brought the sharp blade down on the back of Spike’s head. The little dragon went down like a sack of hammers, screaming and clutching the back of his skull.

“What are you doin’!?” Apple Bloom shrieked in panic. “Is that a real hatchet!? I thought it was a prop!”

“I found this behind the barn!” Scootaloo said. “And you heard him! He got bit! I’m sorry, Spike, but you have to go down!”

She raised the hatchet and brought it down onto Spike’s head again, and again, and again.

“Stop that!” Spike cried with tears in his eyes. “That really hurts!”

“Stop resisting, damn you!” Scootaloo ordered. “Let me give you mercy!”

The hatchet flew from Scootaloo’s grip, surrounded in the pale jade aura of Sweetie Belle’s magic. Now disarmed, Scootaloo found herself tackled to the ground by Apple Bloom.

“Lemme go,” Scootaloo growled as she struggled with the much stronger filly. “He needs to be put out of his misery!”

“I’m not infected,” Spike said as he sat up, clutching the newly formed lump on his head. “They bit me but nothing broke the skin.”

“Yeah, right,” Scootaloo said with a huff. “Like I’m going to believe something a zombie says.”

“A zombie wouldn’t say anything,” Sweetie said as she pried Spike’s claws away to inspect his injury. “These scales of his took like six hits from that hatchet, and you really think pony teeth are going to get through that?”

Scootaloo blinked. “Uh… point made. Sorry, Spike.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Spike said as he stood dizzily. He wobbled drunkenly and gave Sweetie Belle a slight nod of thanks when she pressed against his side to steady him. “I know the rules. Just wish you would’ve asked me first.”

“Okay, so now that we’re all on the same page and we ain’t tryin’ to kill each other,” Apple Bloom said as released Scootaloo. “How’s about you tell us what’s happenin’ startin’ from the top?”

Spike sighed tiredly. “All I know is that Rarity and I are handing out candy at the boutique one minute, and the next the streets were crawling with zombies. We ran inside and tried to barricade ourselves in, but we must’ve left the back door open because… because…”

Spike’s voice hitched and tears filled his eyes at the memory. Sweetie stood and pulled him into a hug, tears of her own falling freely down her cheeks. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo turned away to give them a moment of privacy. The two fillies shared a look that communicated worry for their own loved ones, but they both nodded with fierce determination, resolving to stay strong in the face of this tragedy.

Spike recovered himself and wiped his nose with a kerchief Sweetie pulled from some unseen pocket of her costume. “I locked her in a closet and wrote a quick letter to Princess Celestia asking for help before I ran to find Twilight and the others,” he said. “But by the time I got to them they were already turned… I knew I had to get somewhere safe, and that the castle was going to be crawling with the things because of the party, so I headed for Sweet Apple Acres. On the way I heard you guys shouting in here so I just headed for the voices.”

The girls stared at him in stunned silence until the spell was broken by a change in the rhythm of the hoofbeats against the door. A half-dozen more thumps joined Ditzy’s, coming from all sides and accompanied by the eerie moans of tortured hunger. They all tensed up considerably but knew they were still safe for the moment.

“That’s… that’s crazy…” Sweetie whispered fearfully. “Didn’t you send a letter to Princess Celestia? Where is she? Why isn’t she here helping?”

“She did reply,” Spike said gravely. “Actually, it’s weird, the reply came from Luna. She said not to worry and that she’d take care of everything. A few seconds later Discord showed up.”

“Discord’s out there?” Apple Bloom asked. “Is he kickin’ zombie butt with that crazy chaos magic stuff?”

Spike shook his head sadly. “No, all he did was drop a giant glass dome over Ponyville, like that time Trixie showed up with that amulet. I saw him sitting up there eating popcorn and laughing at us.”

“Dangit,” Scootaloo cursed. “That means that they don’t intend to help us. This is a containment operation.”

“What do you mean they’re not helping us?” Sweetie Belle asked, her voice rising in pitch in relation to her panic.

“They’re going to leave us here to die!” Scootaloo explained as she pointed a hoof to the sky. “They’re just trying to keep the disease from spreading, but they don’t know that that never works! The zombie plague always gets out!”

“She’s right,” Spike said. “That’s how it works in the lore.”

“What lore?” Apple Bloom asked in a harsh whisper, mindful of the frantic attempts by the creatures outside to break their defenses.

“The zombie lore,” Scootaloo clarified. “Movies, comics, novels, graphic novels, movie adaptation novels, comic adaptations of the movie adaptation novels… it all agrees: once the zombie apocalypse starts, it’s unstoppable. It’ll spread and within a month the entire planet will be a charred, burning husk of what it once was.”

“I don’t want to live in a charred, burning husk!” Sweetie Belle cried.

“Calm down!” Scootaloo demanded with a point of her hoof. “You’re going to exacerbate the situation!”

“What the hay does that mean!?” Apple Bloom asked.

“I don’t know! They said it in a movie!”

“It means make things worse,” Spike supplied helpfully.

“See?” Scootaloo said. “Now quit being an exacerbator and calm down. We’re going to be okay.”

“How do you know that?” Sweetie Belle asked.

Scootaloo grinned smugly and crossed her arms over her chest. “Simple: I’ve seen every zombie movie ever made, and I know Spike is a fan, too.”

“They’re a guilty pleasure,” he said with a shrug.

“Well, now they were research,” Scootaloo said. "Our combined knowledge of zombies is going to be what gets us through this."

"What can I contribute?" Sweetie asked hopefully. "I don't know that much about zombies..."

"You're a unicorn," Scootaloo said simply. "Magic is useful."

“What about me?” Apple Bloom asked with a raised hoof.

“You’ve got a butt-flap.”

Apple Bloom lifted her flank off the ground and frowned at the flap on her costume. She reached back and tried to redo the buttons as she muttered expletives at Scootaloo.

“Right, so first things first: we’re all agreed that we’re probably the last four living things on the planet, right?” Scootaloo asked.

Sweetie blinked. “Wait, what?”

“Keep up with the conversation!” Scootaloo admonished her friend. “The zombie virus will spread until it kills every living thing on the planet, if it hasn’t already, leaving only the four of us to repopulate the world.”

Spike blinked. “Re-what the what now?”

“Repopulate the world,” Scootaloo repeated matter-of-factly. “It’s a good thing you showed up. We’re going to need a male for this herd if we’re going to birth a new generation of ponies.”

Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Spike all blushed at the suggestion.

“Um… I hate to poop your party, but I don’t think it’ll work…” Apple Bloom said apologetically.

“Why not?”

“Because Spike’s not a pony,” she said simply. “I don’t think dragons can make babies with ponies.”

“Wait, they can!” Sweetie Belle exclaimed excitedly as the discussion triggered something from her memory. “I heard Spike talking to Rarity about it once! He said that dragons can make babies with ponies, but they’d be half-dragon!”

All three fillies turned to Spike expectantly. He shrunk away from their stares and backed against a wall nervously.

“What…?” he asked with a trembling voice. “Why are you staring at me?”

“Well?” Scootaloo asked eagerly. “Is it true?”

Spike’s eyes darted around the room, searching for some escape. “I… uh… I may have overheard Twilight mention something about it being possible…”

“Well…?” Scootaloo urged.

“Well, what?”

“Well, how do you do it?” Sweetie Belle asked bluntly. “How do you put babies in us?”

The world grew dark but Spike managed to fight off the urge to faint. “You three don’t know how to make babies…?”

They all shook their heads.

“We’re supposed to learn that next year,” Apple Bloom said. “I asked Applejack about it but she said to ask Miss Cheerilee, and Miss Cheerilee said to ask Granny, and Granny made me go upstairs and take a cold shower.”

The little filly shivered at the memory.

“I… I don’t know how to make babies either…” Spike lied.

“Oh,” all three girls said in unison, simultaneously hanging their heads sadly.

Spike whisked the sweat away from his forehead in relief.

“I guess we’ll figure that out later,” Scootaloo said with a disappointed sigh. She’d really been looking forward to finding out about babies. “Regardless, we need to organize ourselves. We’re going to need food and water, but we already know we’re the only survivors, so looting will be down to a minimum. Seeing as food’s not an issue, our first real concern should be defense. Spike? How’s your fire work against them?”

Spike grinned. “You mean my totally radical magical dragonfire that can burn anything? It lights them up like tinder. I had to burn a few on my way here.”

“Awesome,” Scootaloo said with a grin of her own. “I’ve got my hatchet, and we can find something for Bloom and Sweetie along the way. So that’s defenses. Next: our hit list.”

“Hit list?” the room’s other three occupants asked in unison.

“Yeah!” Scootaloo shouted. “We’re completely unsupervised! We can do anything we want! Get revenge on anypony we want!”

“I don’t think we should be in the market for revenge…” Spike suggested warily.

Sweetie Belle quieted him with a wave of her hoof. “Shhhhhh, let’s hear her out.”

“Think about it,” Scootaloo said through a wicked smile. “Everypony who has ever wronged us is out there as a shambling, brainless monster. Haven’t you ever wanted to smash Diamond Tiara’s face in with a chair?”

The rest of the group, including Spike, shifted nervously but didn’t immediately say no.

“I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to hurt anypony before, because I reckon that just ain’t nice,” Apple Bloom said cautiously. “But puttin’ down zombie Diamond Tiara does sound pretty fun.”

“And it doesn’t stop at revenge!” Scootaloo declared triumphantly. “There’s nopony left to tell us what to do! Nopony to make us do our homework, make us go to bed, or keep us from eating ice cream until we puke ourselves inside out!”

The other two crusaders let Scootaloo’s honeyed words wash over them and whip them into a frenzy. Sure the world was over, the undead roamed freely, and they’d never see their loved ones again, but for just a moment, they were ready to believe that anything was possible.

Spike just raised an eyebrow. “I’d like to point out my discomfort at the readiness of this little group to so quickly devolve into barbarism.”

“Your concern is noted,” Scootaloo said. “Does that mean you’re not going to help us?”

“Oh, no, no, no, of course I’m in,” Spike assured the three fillies with a toothy grin. “I just wanted to point it out.”

Scootaloo smirked nodded towards the entrance. “Alright then, Cutie Mark Crusader Zombie Apocalypse Survivors, let’s get out there and crack some skulls!”

The group gave a warcry and converged on the door. Sweetie Belle stood at the back as Apple Bloom ran forward to remove the barricade. Scootaloo drew her hatchet and Spike let loose a few warm-up puffs of emerald fire.

Apple Bloom threw the door open and they strode forward towards their ultimate destinies.

* * *

Apple Bloom sighed around the stick she held in her teeth. She speared a wadded up paper bag with the nail at the end of the stick and deposited the piece of refuse in a large burlap sack slung across her shoulders. The sack was clearly meant for much larger ponies, so it dragged behind her on the ground.

Nearby, Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo were carrying similar implements.

“I hate this stupid thing,” Sweetie Belle growled as she tried to readjust the oversized orange work vest she was wearing.

“Well, you better get used to it, because it was the smallest size they had and we still have two-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-six more hours of community service,” Scootaloo sighed as she leaned against her trash collecting pole.

Apple Bloom spat out the stick and groaned. “I still can’t believe the whole thing was a Nightmare Night prank set up by Discord and Luna.”

“Well, we’re lucky we got off with just community service for all those buildings we set on fire,” Sweetie pointed out. “It would’ve been way worse if we’d actually killed anypony.”

“Speakin’ of – think they’ll ever let Spike out of prison?” Apple Bloom asked.

“I hope so,” Sweetie Belle said. “It’s not his fault that his magical dragonfire broke all the safeguard spells they put in place to keep anypony from actually dying. That’s Discord’s fault if anything.”

“That’s why they only gave him thirty-two counts of ponyslaughter, instead of straight up murder,” Scootaloo reminded them. “I’m sure he’ll get paroled eventually. He’ll probably even get a royal pardon once Twilight gets tired of cooking for herself. I bet he’ll be back on the streets before we’re even halfway finished with our community service.”

“Either way, it is nice that things are going good for him and Rarity,” Sweetie added. “I always knew she secretly had a thing for bad boys.”

Scootaloo admired her new Cutie Mark – a bloody hatchet – and frowned at the irony of having a talent she’d never get to use again. “At least they’re getting conjugal visits.”

“What’s a conjugal visit?” Apple Bloom asked.

“Dunno,” Scootaloo said with a shrug. “I heard Dash talking about it. I guess it’s something where she can go tutor him in Equish. You know, conjugating verbs and stuff.”

“But ain’t he like a librarian or somethin’? I reckon a librarian would be good at readin’ and such.”

“I don’t know!” Scootaloo replied tersely. “Maybe she’s the one that needs a tutor!”

An aluminum can struck Scootaloo on the side of the head and fell to the grass with a hollow thud. She turned and glared at the filly that threw it at her.

“You convicts quit all that chit-chat,” Diamond Tiara said from under the umbrella where she and Silver Spoon were having a picnic. She tilted her mirrored sunglasses down and smirked wickedly at the trio as she opened another can of soda. “I’d hate to have to tell the judge that you’ve been shirking your duties.”

“How the hay did you two even get to be our probation officers!?” Scootaloo demanded.

“Daddy pulled some strings with the mayor,” Diamond Tiara said haughtily. She made a show of enjoying the refreshing can of soda and smacked her lips in satisfaction. “Now get back to work. Another hour and you get a scheduled fifteen minute break.”

The three felonious fillies picked their tools back up and went back to work.

“I hate Nightmare Night…” Scootaloo muttered sourly.

* * *

The Beating Of That Hideous Heart

Fluttershy stepped out of her cottage and greeted the day with a chipper, “Good morning, Equestria.”

And it was a good morning. The sun was shining, the skies were clear and blue, and the gentle songs of her bird friends filled the air with joyful sound.

She breathed deeply, letting the crisp, cool air fill her lungs and clear away the last vestiges of the morning ‘blahs’. She spread her wings and hummed a tune as she glided down the walkway and over the stream that separated her cottage from the road leading into Ponyville. She dropped onto the dusty path and trotted up to her mailbox. The flag was up, meaning that Mister Zippy the poststallion had already been by.

“What a wonderful day to be alive,” she hummed contentedly as she opened the box and pulled out a small stack of mail. She quickly scanned the pile of bills and advertisements to make sure they were all addressed to her. Mister Zippy was a nice stallion, but he was a little nearsighted and sometimes delivered the wrong mail.

She paused as she came across a plain white envelope with her name scrawled on it messily with some kind of red marker. Oddly, it didn’t even seem to have a stamp. Curiosity getting the better of her, she put the rest of the mail back into the box and opened the mystery envelope.

Inside was a slip of thick, white paper, hastily folded and crammed awkwardly into the envelope. She unfolded it and read the contents of the letter. There, written in the same red ink, in the same messy cipher, was the message: “You stupid idiot, I am going to murder you for what you’ve done to me.”

She blinked.

Fluttershy double checked the envelope to make sure it was still addressed to her. It was.

She cocked her head curiously at the letter, reading it a few more times to be sure she completely understood what it was saying. A few hard minutes of scrutiny later and she realized that something about the ink was very strange. The shade of red was very dark, almost black, and flaky. She brought the letter to her face, sniffed it, and gave it a quick little lick.

“Oooooh, I see!” she said in recognition. “It’s blood!”

Then she passed out.

* * *

“I don’t believe this…” Rainbow Dash said as she read over the neatly arranged letters sitting atop Fluttershy’s coffee table. “Who the hay would…? I just… How long has this been going on!?”

“For a week,” Fluttershy squeaked as she shrunk further into her couch. “I’ve been getting one a day, every day, for the past week.”

“And you only just told me this now!?” Rainbow Dash snapped as she spun to gape at her friend is disbelief. “Why would you not tell me, or Twi, or anypony, about this for a whole week!?”

“I, um… I didn’t any reason to scare anypony unnecessarily, in case it’s just a prank…” she whimpered timidly from behind her mane.

Rainbow Dash threw her hooves into the air in utter frustration. “Bargh! I can’t believe somepony is making threats against your life and you wouldn’t even come to your best of the best friends about it! This is serious! Way super serious!”

“I just didn’t want to be a bother,” Fluttershy said with a meek little cough to clear her throat. “I did ask my bear friend to sleep on the couch until I found out who’s been sending them, but yesterday he was called away on a business trip, so…”

Rainbow Dash tilted her head curiously. “What kind of business trip would a bear get called away on…?”

“I try not to pry,” Fluttershy answered with a shrug. “He’s a very private fellow.”

“Look, that’s beside the point,” Rainbow Dash said with a shake of her head. “Rainbow Dash is on the case now and she’s going to take care of this.”

“You’re not going to involve the other girls, too, are you?”

Rainbow Dash shook her head and scoffed derisively. “You kidding? Some jerk thinks he can make threats against Rainbow Dash’s oldest pal? I’m taking care of this myself. They don’t call me the Element of Loyalty for nothing.”

Rainbow Dash punched her hooves together excitedly and gave Fluttershy a grin that was supposed to be reassuring, but came off more predatory than anything.

“Ohhhhh…” Fluttershy muttered quietly to herself as Dash snagged a magnifying glass from the bookshelf and began analyzing the letters. “This’ll all end in tears, I know it…”

* * *

Fluttershy opened her front door just a smidgen and peeked out the crack. It was a beautiful, sunshiny day, just like every other beautiful, sunshiny day that she’d received one of the anonymous death threats. The only difference was that the sounds of birdsong were eerily absent. She’d been worried for the safety of her animal friends, so she’d sent them away until this whole ugliness was dealt with.

It had taken a good amount of bribing to get him to agree, but she’d even sent Angel Bunny away to stay at Sweet Apple Acres for a few days. Applejack had wondered why, but simply shrugged when Fluttershy told her that they just needed a couple of days apart.

Fluttershy moaned nervously and opened the door slowly, causing it to creak noisily in the ominous silence. She leaned her head out and saw she was alone.

“Oooohhhhhh… please, Mister Murderer,” she whimpered pleadingly, in case somepony was hiding within earshot, “I don’t want any trouble. I just want to check if you left me another note…”

Fluttershy stepped out of her cottage and immediately dropped to her belly, combat crawling along the ground the whole way to the mailbox. It took a little while, but she eventually made it to her goal and rose on shaky legs.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Fluttershy,” she laughed nervously to herself. “You’re being a big fat silly scaredy-pony… Everything’s going to be fine…”

“Good morning, Miss Fluttershy!”

Fluttershy let out an “Eeep!” of surprise and went rigid. Every muscle in her body locked up and she tilted over to the side, landing in the dirt road with a thud.

“Golly, sorry about that,” said the stallion standing over her prone form. He was adjusting his powerfully thick glasses and blushing sheepishly at the reaction his greeting had elicited. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

Fluttershy sighed as she realized it was just nice Mister Zippy, her mail-carrier. He was smiling, as he always was, as he scratched at his snow-white mane in embarrassment. She’d known him to complain in the past that his mane and dark gray coat made him look much older than he was, but Fluttershy thought it made him look distinguished.

“Gosh, I’m so relieved it’s you,” she giggled. “You wouldn’t believe the week I’ve had.”

“Oh?” Zippy the mailpony said curiously as he reached down to help her stand. “What sort of trouble would a nice, quiet mare like you get herself int—“

Zippy’s question was cut short as he disappeared in a cloud of spilled letters, comically spinning prescription glasses, and a damningly prismatic contrail.

“I got you now, you dirty little creep!” Rainbow Dash shouted as she shook the culprit violently. “Spill the beans, perp! What’s your game!?”

Fluttershy rose to her hooves in a panic. Dash had tackled the unsuspecting stallion at near-top speed, and was now thrashing him around on the ground some twenty paces away, at the end of a shallow furrow left by the impact.

“Rainbow Dash, no!” she cried in horror. “Stop! That’s Mister Zippy! You know him!”

“Yeah, I know this freakazoid,” Dash stated loudly as she gripped him by his blue postal worker’s overcoat, “and what better cover for slipping horrible notes into somepony’s mailbox than being a postalpony? It’s the perfect crime!”

Zippy shook bonelessly as Rainbow Dash marehandled him in an attempt to rouse him back to his senses.

“Quit playing possum, ya lousy mug!” Rainbow Dash commanded, channeling her inner noir detective. She reared back a hoof and gave him a rough slap across the face, but to no avail.

Fluttershy rushed over and shoved her athletic friend aside with surprising strength. She examined the unmoving stallion for injuries and noticed immediately that he wasn’t breathing. She put an ear to his chest and found no heartbeat. Combined with the unnatural angle at which his neck bent, she came to the logical conclusion: “You… you killed him…”

Rainbow Dash’s jaw dropped. “No, I didn’t,” she said in protest.

“Yes, you did,” Fluttershy retorted as she spun to glare at friend in disbelief.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes. You did. You killed him.”

Rainbow Dash grabbed a nearby stick and approached the quickly cooling corpse. She poked it twice in ribs, once in the tender part of the belly, and even gave a quick jab to the eye just to be sure. Nothing she did elicited even the hint of a response.

“Well, I’ll be damned, I did kill him…” Rainbow Dash whispered reverently. She fell to her rump and stared, shaking in disbelief, at her hooves. “I… I’ve never killed anypony before…”

Fluttershy stood on her hindlegs and bounced excitedly, shaking her hooves and flapping her wings hysterically.

“Ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh,” she chanted in panic. “Weeeeeeee killed somepony, ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh! We’re going to go to prison!”

Rainbow Dash’s head snapped up at the mention of prison. She quickly stood and slapped a hoof over Fluttershy’s mouth to stop the steady stream of incriminating blabber. She tensed up and scanned frantically for any witnesses.

“Quiet down,” Rainbow Dash whispered harshly. She removed her hoof from Fluttershy’s mouth and looked her straight in the eyes. “Nopony’s going to prison.”

Fluttershy’s irises shrunk to pinpricks. “You think they’ll send us to the moon? Or hang us? Or hang us on the moon!? There’s no gravity on the moon, Rainbow! No gravity! It’ll take forever to hang us without any gravity!”

Rainbow Dash shook the panicking mare gently. “Stop! Nothing’s going to happen to us because nopony’s going to find out about this!”

Fluttershy watched in shock as Rainbow Dash darted around picking up every spilled piece of mail. Rainbow Dash slipped the carrier bag off of Zippy’s shoulder and stuffed every last letter back inside, along with his glasses. With a flick of her head, the whole kit and caboodle arced gracefully through the air and landed in the creek with a splash.

“What’re you doing?” Fluttershy asked fearfully.

“Getting rid of the evidence,” Dash informed her as she began smoothing the trench they’d made back into even ground. She trotted back to the corpse and motioned for Fluttershy to join her. “Grab the other end, we gotta bury this thing.”

“It’s not a thing!” Fluttershy said indignantly. “He’s a very nice stallion and we killed him!”

Rainbow Dash grabbed Fluttershy again and held her close to her chest, stroking her mane tenderly and whispering softly. “Shhhhh, it’s okay, we’re going to be okay, everything’s a-okay.”

“Oh… I desperately want to believe that,” Fluttershy said, blinking away the tears in her eyes.

“Then believe it!” Rainbow Dash said. “We’re in this together, you and me, just like back in school. Just think about it like this: we’re heroes. We’ve saved everypony in Equestria like fifty-frajillion times. What’s one or two murders, huh? I say we’ve got a couple of freebies saved up.”

Fluttershy blinked. “That… that doesn’t make even a little bit of sense…”

Rainbow Dash set her friend down and gave her a serious glare. “Do you want to go to prison?”

Fluttershy shook her head vigorously.

“Or get executed on the moon?”

Fluttershy shook her head again.

“Then help me figure out where to hide this body!”

Fluttershy groaned uncomfortably. “Are you sure this is the right thing to do…?”

“It’s the thing we have to do, Shy,” Rainbow Dash said as she fumbled awkwardly for a good grip on the limp stallion’s torso. “It’ll be fine, long as we stick together. Together we can accomplice anything.”

“Accomplish.”

“Just grab his legs,” Rainbow Dash said with a sigh.

* * *

“I can’t believe you’ve had a cellar this whole time,” Rainbow Dash said as she dragged the body down the stairs. Each yank of the body was accompanied by the loud thunk of the skull striking against the creaking wooden steps. It was hard work, but the white bed sheet Fluttershy had insisted on wrapping him in gave her something to grip onto.

“Nopony does,” Fluttershy said meekly as she stepped into the shadows, out of the shaft of light shining down from the open hatchway above. “I had some of my underground friends dig it for me. It’s just a storage place, and none of my animals are allowed down here. There are too many fragile… things.”

“What kind of fragile things?” Rainbow Dash asked as she got the body to the bottom of the steps with a final grunt. She coughed as the corpse striking the dirt floor stirred up a small cloud of dust that blew into her face. “Ugh, musty down here.”

There was a quick click from the darkness and the cellar was immediately bathed in a dull yellow light. Rainbow Dash’s eyes opened wide at the sight she beheld. The entire room was filled with wooden racks and shelves, each practically groaning with the weight of the bottles they held. In the corner were several very large wooden casks – the kind that Applejack kept her cider in.

“What… the… actual… Tartarus…?” Rainbow Dash whispered as she took in the room. “What is this…?”

“It’s my wine cellar,” Fluttershy said, her defensiveness bringing a little steel to her voice.

“You drink wine!?”

Fluttershy blushed. “My… um… doctor said that a glass of wine every night was good for my heart.”

“This is a little much for a glass a night,” Rainbow Dash suggested.

“Look, taking care of animals is really stressful, okay!?” Fluttershy snapped tersely.

“Whoa, ease up!” Dash said as she held up her hooves placatingly. “Just saying… it’s a lot of wine.”

“Can we just get this done, please?” Fluttershy said with a low whimper.

Rainbow Dash nodded and pointed to a bare corner of the room. A round indentation in the dirt indicated that the spot had recently held one of the many heavy barrels. “What’s in those barrels?”

“Amaretillado,” Fluttershy said with pride. “It’s a very rare foreign wine. Berry Punch and I have the only casks in Equestria.”

“We’ll dig there,” Rainbow Dash said with a quirk of her eyebrow as she learned more about her oldest friend’s secret passion. “Then we can put some of the barrels on top of the spot so nopony notices that it was recently disturbed. Later maybe we can wall it up with some stones or something.”

“Nopony comes down here though,” Fluttershy said.

“Better safe than sorry,” Rainbow Dash stated confidently as she pulled the body to their hiding spot. “You got shovels in the garden shed, right?”

Fluttershy nodded and began following Rainbow Dash as she left the room. She paused at the base of the stairs and looked at one of the many nearby racks. She smacked her lips thirstily, went to the rack, and tucked a bottle under her wing. A chill went up her spine at the memory of Mister Zippy and his broken neck, so she grabbed a second of the big glass bottles.

“Definitely a two glass night…”

A bottle under each wing, she headed for the kitchen to hide them from Dash. She’d made it halfway back up the cellar stairs before spinning around smoothly and walking back to the rack.

“Three glasses,” she muttered around the bottle neck clenched between her teeth. “Three glasses and that’s it.”

* * *

Fluttershy sat up in bed, sweat pouring down her face. The sheets were soaked with perspiration from the horrible dreams she’d been having. She kept reliving the moment of Mister Zippy’s murder.

In the dream, the sun wasn’t shining, and Mister Zippy seemed so much smaller, frailer, than he was in real life. When Rainbow Dash came crashing in, her attack wasn’t silent and sudden, it was preceded by a Rainboom and accompanied by the harsh sound of snapping bones. Rainbow Dash herself was huge in the dream, monstrous even. She was easily bigger than their friend, Bulk Biceps, and every time she slammed Zippy to the ground she’d give a rumbling “Yeah!” of such force and volume that it could shame a dragon’s roar. It didn’t help that her parents, her primary school teacher, and all their friends were there, alternating between clucking their tongues in disapproval and making out with each other.

Dreams were weird. Hopefully the weirdness would be enough to keep Luna from getting suspicious if she popped in during one of her dream patrols.

Fluttershy held her face in her hooves and began taking long, deep breaths to try and circumvent the fast approaching fit of hyperventilation that came with the idea of the princesses getting even a hint at what was buried in her wine cellar. At least none of her animals were home yet, so she was free to freak out in relative peace. Three whole days without her animals made her feel more than a bit lonely, but she couldn’t risk and of the critters finding out. Not a lot of ponies knew it, but animals were notorious gossips – especially chipmunks. If Puffy-Cheeks or Nut-Breath found out what was going on, the entire forest would know within the hour.

She looked at her alarm clock and sighed. It wasn’t even quite midnight yet, and she was wide awake. Not even her usual nightcap was enough to keep her down, not at night, with the nightmares and the creaking walls of her house settling in the coolness of night.

The only good thing that seemed to come from all this horribleness was that she hadn’t received a threatening letter in days. It really did seem like Zippy the postal worker had been the one sending her the threats all along.

A crash sounded from downstairs, suddenly breaking the silence and startling the cowardly girl back under her covers. She shivered with terror and raised her ears from their flattened position to focus her hearing.

Silence.

“Oh… come on, now, Fluttershy…” she whispered encouragingly to herself as she slowly pulled down her blankety defenses. “Nopony’s there. You’re just jumpy. All your animals are in their forest homes, Angel’s still at Applejack’s, and the killer was caught… well the attempted killer… Technically only Rainbow killed anypony, and you were an accessory after the fact, which also kind of makes you a murderer… Oh Celestia, I live in a murder-house…”

Fluttershy brushed that train of thought away with a shiver.

Carefully, slowly, she stood in bed and floated off with a gentle stroke of her wings. She hovered towards the stairs, airborne so she wouldn’t make a sound stepping on the floorboards. She descended the stairwell, down to the main floor, and peeked cautiously into the living room.

Luna’s moon was bright, casting its rays into the room through the windows and bathing the whole house with a calming, blue-tinted light. To Fluttershy’s surprise, and despite the earlier commotion, nothing seemed out of place.

“Is anypony down here…?” she asked cautiously, expecting something to leap from the shadows any second now. The lack of response somehow made the situation even more disturbing.

Fluttershy let out a sigh of relief, touched down, and walked the rest of the way down the stairs.

“See?” she told herself. “Nothing to worry about, you silly pony…”

Another thud, like the one from before, but louder by proximity, filled the room. Fluttershy backed up in reflex, heedless of the fact that she was on the stairs. She tripped and went for a tumble down the last few steps, managing to avoid serious injury but still giving herself a good bump on the head against the end table near the couch. She stood groggily, momentarily forgetting the sound, only to be reminded by a third, more forceful thud.

“Eeep!” she squeaked as she leapt into the air. She hovered above the floor, gaping in astonished fear as she realized the noise was coming from under the floorboards.

The sounds were becoming more regular, coming in pairs and at rhythmic intervals.

Thump-thump.

It was like the beating of some hideous heart, there, beneath her floorboards!

Fluttershy gasped as the sound of shattering glass and splintered wood joined the rhythmic thumping.

“My medicine!” she shrieked in terror. Someone was in her cellar, destroying her precious wine collection – the collection that had taken her years to refine and gather in secret.

Fluttershy rushed to the carpet in the middle of the floor and yanked it away, revealing the secret hatch leading into the cellar. She was about to leap into the darkness when something half-hidden by the shadows turned towards the stairs and roared with an unearthly howl.

Fluttershy slammed the hatch shut and sat atop it, blinking in confusion at the sudden silence. She got off the door, lowered herself to the ground, and opened it just enough to peek inside.

The thing in the cellar screeched again, and once more went silent the moment she closed the door.

She trotted away numbly, braced her head against the couch, and pushed it very slowly – the legs scraping loudly against the floorboards the whole way – onto the cellar door.

Fluttershy opened wide, filled her lungs to full capacity, then screamed as loud as she could before flying out the front door faster than she’d ever flown before. She tore through the sky, a yellow blur against the indigo night, her hooves stuffed into her mouth to muffle the screams she wasn’t able to suppress.

Rainbow Dash’s cloud home came into view after only a minute or so of terrified flight. Fluttershy landed on the stoop, stood on her hind legs, and kicked the door in without so much as a knock.

Rainbow Dash was awake despite the hour and standing in the living room. She spun around at the sudden intrusion and gasped.

“What the hay!?” Rainbow Dash shouted. Fluttershy had removed her hooves from her mouth and was now wailing at a volume Rainbow Dash hadn't known she could reach.

Rainbow Dash ran over to he friend and shook her by the shoulders. “Fluttershy! Snap out of it! What’s wrong!?”

“Monster! Zippy! Undead revenant! Revenge! Wine!”

“You’re not making any sense!” Rainbow Dash shouted.

Fluttershy slapped her friend’s hooves away and began shaking Rainbow Dash back. “There’s a monster in my cellar and I think it’s Mister Zippy as an undead revenant out for revenge against my wine!”

Rainbow Dash shrugged off Fluttershy’s admittedly strong grip and chuckled.

“Oh, is that what this is?” she said with a sad chuckle. “Shy, you’re freaking out over nothing. There’s nothing in your basement, it’s just the house settling at night.”

“I know what creaky floorboards sound like, Rainbow!” Fluttershy sputtered in protest.

“You’re a real nervous pony, Shy,” Rainbow Dash said with a sigh. “It’s okay. I understand how stressful this has been, living in the house above the… evidence…”

“It roared at me, Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy declared with a stomp of her hoof against the pillowy soft cloud floor. “Creaky houses don’t roar.”

Rainbow Dash groaned tiredly and plopped to her haunches to rub at her temples. “Look, I’m sorry, Fluttershy, but I don’t have time for your freak out just right now. I can deal with it later, but I’ve got kind of a crisis on my hooves, over here.”

“Nevermore!”

Fluttershy blinked owlishly. “Nevermore what?” she asked.

“That wasn’t me,” Rainbow Dash said morosely.

“Nevermore! Nevermore!”

Fluttershy looked around the room for the source of the shrill call. Sitting atop the cloudy chandelier was a bird, black as coal and staring at the pair of ponies with a curious tilt of its head.

“Is that a raven?” Fluttershy asked.

Rainbow Dash got to her hooves and glared at it with absolute and unfiltered hate in her eyes. “It’s a bastard, is what it is!”

“Rainbow Dash!” Fluttershy gasped. “I’m surprised at you! It’s just a cute little birdy!”

“Nevermore!”

Rainbow Dash ran to the nearly bare bookshelf and hurled her copy of Daring Doo and the Secret of the Ooze at the horrid thing. The raven dodged with a light flap of its wings and returned to its perch to preen itself in contempt of her anger.

“It’s not a bird!” Rainbow Dash declared hotly. “It’s a demon, straight from Tartarus!”

Fluttershy gaped as she realized that the entire living room was in a state of chaos. Books were sticking halfway out of the cloud walls, almost all the furniture was broken or toppled over, and everything that wasn’t nailed down seemed to have been scattered carelessly about the room.

“What’s going on?” Fluttershy asked with concern.

“That monster has been haunting me for three days now!” Rainbow Dash declared with an accusatory point of her hoof.

“Nevermore!” the raven crowed.

“See!?” Rainbow Dash asked desperately. “Do you see it!? It’s all he says! Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore!”

“Nevermore!”

“I know nevermore!” Rainbow Dash shrieked furiously. She collapsed to the ground and bit her lip painfully, trying to hold back the sobs building in her chest. “I’m just so tired. I haven’t even been able to sleep because the damned bird just starts shouting even louder. Tank left two days ago. He’s been sleeping in the lake. And I can’t even go to a hotel because this… thing… follows me wherever I go.”

“Have you tried catching it?” Fluttershy asked.

“That’s the first thing I tried,” Rainbow Dash snapped. She stood and waved her arm dramatically over the wrecked living room. “He’s wily, that one. I’ve broken nearly everything in the house chasing him down. He’s not fast, but I’ve never seen such a nimble bird in my life.”

Rainbow Dash threw herself back to the floor at Fluttershy’s hooves. “You gotta talk to him, Shy! You know animals! You can make him leave! Or trick him into a pie with twenty-three other black birds or something!”

Fluttershy nodded and set her shoulders as she gave the bird a stern glare.

“Mister Raven, my name is Fluttershy,” she said politely, but with enough steel in her voice to let the bird know she meant business. “I need you to leave my friend alone so she can come and help me get rid of the thing in my cellar.”

“Nevermore,” it replied.

“I see,” Fluttershy said with a nod.

“What’d it say?” Rainbow Dash asked, her voice laced with suspicion.

“It said, ‘Nevermore’,” Fluttershy answered with a sigh. “It’s speaking Equish, Rainbow, not Bird. It’s saying what it’s saying.”

Rainbow Dash threw her hooves into the air and growled. “Great! Wonderful! Splendid! Everypony has gone insane!”

Fluttershy frowned at this assessment, but with the night she’d been having she couldn’t fully discount it.

“Can you just come and help me with my problem first?” Fluttershy asked. “I promise we can take care of the raven right after.”

“No,” Rainbow Dash said with a firm shake of her head. “No, this bird comes first. This is personal. He bucked the cloud and now he’s going to get the lightning.”

“Please!” Fluttershy pleaded. “We can’t let the other girls find out about this! You’re the only one I can turn to! Remember what you said? Together we can accomplice anything!”

“Shy, I barely remember my own name right now, I’m so tired.”

“Nevermore!”

“Fine!” Fluttershy shouted with uncharacteristic anger. “I’ll just go get eaten, then! I’ll get eaten and then you’ll finally be happy!”

“Sounds great,” Rainbow Dash mumbled as she stroked her chin thoughtfully and plotted the death of her feathery foe aloud. “Maybe some sort of ballista… Or a sexy lady crow decoy...”

* * *

When Fluttershy returned, the cacophony from her house had reached a new pitch. The thing from the cellar seemed to have escaped his confines, and she could hear furniture being tossed around, along with the growls of righteous undead fury as the thing that had formerly been kindly, middle-aged Mister Zippy tore her house apart.

All in all, it seemed like the best move to simply wait outside until he tuckered himself out. She parked herself in the dirt road leading to her cottage, hiding behind her stream and some half-remembered superstition about evil creatures being unable to cross running bodies of water.

Finally, after an hour or so, the noise finally died down. After only another hour of bravely keeping vigilant watch, Fluttershy felt that enough was enough.

“Just go in there and apologize,” Fluttershy said to herself as she worried a rut into her own lawn with her pacing. “He’s going to be angry, but of course he will. You murdered him. You’d be angry if somepony murdered you. You’ll just have to explain it was an accident… an accident that you tried to cover up by burying him in your basement…”

Fluttershy crept slowly up to the door, tiphoofing closer, an inch at a time, until she was right up against the door. She turned the knob and peeked in cautiously.

A lamp had been switched on at some point during the monster’s rampage, and the light it cast revealed a curious sight. The room was spotless – nothing was broken, or even mildly out of place.

“Huh…” she muttered as she stood up straight and walked in.

“Oh, hello there, Miss Fluttershy,” came the cheery, kindly voice of Mister Zippy.

The left half of Fluttershy’s body went numb and shut down from terror for a split second, nearly dropping her to the ground for a second time that night. She held it together, tensing up in preparation to flee the house again if need be.

Sure enough, sitting on the couch was Zippy, smiling as widely as she’d ever seen him, despite the damp earth that clung to his mane and overcoat. He had a bottle of wine resting in his lap, and he lifted it to his lips for a quick sip.

“That is you, isn’t it?” he asked, his smile dimming a little as he squinted at her. “Don’t got my glasses so I can’t quite make you out. I see yellow, pink, and a pair of wings, though!”

“Um… Yes…?” she answered timidly.

“Oh good,” he said with a sigh. “Welcome home. Hope you don’t mind, but I helped myself to one of your bottles.”

“I… you… uh… I… what?”

“What what?” he asked curiously.

“What is going on here…?” she asked carefully. “Aren’t you…?”

“…dead?” he said. “Seems that way.”

“And you’re not…?”

“…angry?”

He picked up the bottle and took a long pull from it, swishing it around in his mouth as he toyed with the bottle thoughtfully.

“I was,” he explained. “But then I got to drinking.”

“You mean thinking?” she asked.

He grinned and wagged the bottle at her. “If you do enough of one it always leads to the other.”

Despite the desperately awkward terror Fluttershy felt, she giggled. Zippy always could make her laugh.

“You know – and I’m a little ashamed to admit this – I fully intended to come up here and murder you,” he said with a laugh.

Fluttershy’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, no, don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “I’m over it. I figure a nice, sweet, pretty gal like you had to have a reason for what you did.”

Fluttershy blushed at the compliment and cleared her throat.

“Oh, well… you see… I’ve been getting these notes in my mailbox since last week…”

It didn’t take all that long for Fluttershy to explain about the situation on her end. Zippy had been quiet the whole time, nodding politely as he worked his way to the bottom of the bottle.

“Well that’s quite a story,” he said once gotten him up to speed. “I can tell you, though, that I didn’t send you any of those threats.”

Fluttershy frowned in confusion. “Then why did they stop after Rainbow Dash… um…?”

“…killed me? No idea. Might’ve just been a coincidence.”

“Oh, I wanted to ask,” Fluttershy said. “If you weren’t angry anymore, why were you making all that noise in the living room a little while ago?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “I was looking for my glasses and bumping into furniture! I tried to put everything back the way it was, but I’m not sure how well I did. I can’t see a thing without my darned specs.”

A tinge of pink came back to Fluttershy’s face at the explanation. “They’re in the creek… Rainbow Dash threw them and your mail bag in there to dispose of the evidence.”

“Smart move,” he chuckled. “She should’ve dumped them further away, though. No matter, I have a spare pair at home.”

“So then,” Fluttershy said nervously. “What do we do now?”

“Well, I should probably get back to work,” Zippy said with a sigh as he got off the couch. “They’re not going to be happy about me being gone for…”

“Three days,” Fluttershy answered.

“Wow… okay I hope I didn’t get fired,” he said worriedly.

“Oooooooh, if there’s anything I can do to make this up to you,” Fluttershy exclaimed as she threw herself at his hooves. “I’ll do anything! Just name it!”

He scratched his chin thoughtfully.

“Well… How about a date?”

“Yes!” she said with a vigorous nod. “Of course! Anything!”

“Sounds great,” he said. “I’d better mosey along then. I’ll talk to you later, Miss Fluttershy.”

“Yes!” she shouted after him with a wave as he walked off into the sunrise. “Have a nice day!”

She shut the door and leaned against it heavily. “Well that was certainly exciting… Wait, do I have a date with a ghoul…?”

* * *

Fluttershy pranced about her living room, tidying up and doing a bit of dusting. Her new coltfriend would be stopping by after work, after all, and it wouldn’t do to have such a messy house.

The date had gone surprisingly well. She had always been very fond of Zippy. He was kind, and courteous, and always had a smile and a joke for her. She was pleasantly surprised that they even shared a lot of the same interests in literature. And it didn’t hurt that he was just so adorable, the way he squinted at everything when he read.

Sure he was a rotting, undead creature of the night, driven by a supernatural need to take vengeance on his murderers, but nopony was perfect. These days, and at Fluttershy’s age, sometimes you just had to settle for what you could get.

And besides, as the old proverb goes: Living well is the best revenge.

Luckily, Zippy hadn’t lost his job. Even more luckily, nopony noticed the rather earthy… musk, that the stallion now had, or the cloudy irises, or the oddly wobbly head… Honestly, it was nothing that a neck brace, a few pints of formaldehyde, and regular bathing couldn’t cover up.

Not that he was ashamed of what he was, but Zombie-Equestrian relations were rather strained at the moment, if popular culture was to be believed. They’d both agreed that maybe it would be best to keep his status as one of the trotting-dead a secret.

A knock at the door brought her out of her musing.

“Oh, you’re early!” she sang happily. She trotted to the door with a lightness in her steps that wasn’t wholly because she was a pegasus. She threw the door open with a grin, expecting to see Zippy’s smiling face, but what met her instead was Applejack’s sour frown.

“Heya, Flutters,” Applejack greeted without cheer in her voice. “Sorry to bother ya, but I’m afraid I gotta bring this critter back to ya.”

Applejack stood aside to reveal Angel Bunny, tied up with a length of rope and sitting in a small cage while he glared daggers at them.

“Oh my,” Fluttershy said. “What happened?”

Applejack removed her hat pulled a few sheets of folded up paper from the lining.

“Dang rascal was stuffin’ these into the family mailbox,” Applejack informed her. “Reckon it’s a dark little hobby this thing’s picked up.

Fluttershy blinked as she looked over the notes. They were death threats, of varying levels of violence and crudeness, written in blood, exactly like the ones that had started this whole mess.

“I don’t believe this,” Fluttershy said tiredly. She looked at the young bunny and met his rebellious glare with a stern, motherly one of her own. “Thank you, Applejack, for watching him. Rest assured that somebunny is going to be going to bed without dessert tonight.”

* * *

Author's Note

Even when I write a Poe parody it somehow turns into a romance... You're all going to be very upset when I release the story for this event that is an actual romantic-horror-comedy. Also, man, this chapter got about twice as long as I expected it to.

Sadie-stic!

Rarity was no stranger to the hubbub and noise of a major retail store – she’d been known to shoulder-check a mare or two into the discount bin during a particularly heated fabric sale – but nothing could’ve prepared her for the horrors of a toy store.

Foals were screaming as they rushed up and down the aisles, fiddling with every gadget and toy they could reach. Even the upper shelves weren’t safe. The air was filled with toys being manipulated by unicorn foals as pegasi children darted hither and thither touching everything they could reach. Some children were being followed by parents clucking their tongues and barking like madponies at their little ones, trying to rein in their wandering hooves.

Rarity did her best to drown out the ruckus and frowned at the display shelf, tilting her head curiously at the empty space advertising Stitchwork Sadie dolls. She adjusted the saddle bags on her back and scanned the area, wondering if maybe the rambunctious little tykes had left some of the dolls lying around the aisle, but her search proved futile.

“Hello, pretty lady!” greeted a stallion from somewhere behind her. “Can I help you locate something?”

Rarity turned to the stallion and immediately recoiled in horror as she came face-to-face with a horrifying donkey-seal-creature in clown makeup and a sailor’s cap.

“Celestia on a cracker!” she cursed as she backed away, holding a hoof to her chest to keep her heart from breaking through her ribs. “You nearly scared the water out of me!”

“Oh, sorry there, missy,” the stallion in the costume said as he roared with an avuncular belly laugh. She couldn’t see his face through the costume’s mask, but if the pudge around his middle was any indication, the jolly laugh matched him well. “Old Uncle Marbles didn’t mean to spook ya! This here costume is to promote our newest line of Captain Fishbutts the Seafaring Clown action figures. Now, is there something specific I can help ya find?”

Rarity smiled brightly and nodded. “Yes, you see I’m in a bit of a bind. I’m here in Manehattan on business and I’ve just been so preoccupied that I completely forgot to purchase a present for my little sister’s birthday.”

“Well you’re super-dee-duper in luck, pretty gal!” the assumedly older stallion said as he capered merrily in his costume. “Loose Marbles is the best durn toy emporium in all of Equestria! We’ve got everything here! Absolutely everything!”

Rarity’s smile brightened at that and she let out a sigh of relief. “That’s wonderful to hear. I’ve been to every store in town and I was beginning to worry that I’d never find a Stitchwork Sadie doll.”

“Stitchwork Sadie?” Old Uncle Marbles repeated as he ceased his excited prancing. “We have none.”

“But you just said you had everything,” Rarity said.

“Everything except that,” Marbles said apologetically. “I’m afraid we’re all sold out. I can put you on the waiting list for the next shipment, though. Should only be a two or three month wait.”

“But her birthday is tomorrow!” Rarity exclaimed in panic. “I have to catch the train home tonight just to make it back in time!”

“I’m real sorry, missy, but that’s the best I can do. Stitchwork Sadie is the hottest doll of the year and you’re not going to find one anywhere in Equestria this close to Giftsmas Eve.”

“I’m sorry, this close to what?” Rarity asked as she turned an ear forward so she could better hear him over the noise of shrieking foals. “I fear I might have misheard you, it sounded like you said… ‘Giftsmas Eve’.”

“Yupper-doodly-doo,” Marbles sang as he rose to his hind legs and did a little jig, sending the googly-eyes of the costume flinging about wildly. “Gifstmas Eve! It’s the most profitable time of the year!”

Rarity raised an eyebrow in bewilderment. “It’s a holiday… in May… called Giftsmas Eve…”

“That is correct!”

“This is one of those holidays created by corporations to increase profits during a regular period of low-sales, isn’t it?”

“That is also correct,” Marbles said with a nod. The costume was very bulky but somehow it conveyed the motion clearly.

“And you’re also saying that because of this holiday I won’t be able to find a Stitchwork Sadie anywhere in the entire nation.”

“All sold out in every store in continental Equestria!” Marbles said as he happily sped up his jig. “Yeeeehaw! We’re making money by the boatload!”

“You have to have at least one hidden away in the back!” Rarity pleaded. She pouted sadly, giving him her best pitiful look – the look that she knew that no stallion could resist from a mare in distress. “If it’s a matter of cost, money is no object, I assure you! It’s literally the only thing she asked for this year, I must have it!”

The force of her pout stopped Marbles’ dance and brought a sympathetic groan from the stallion. “Awwww, well shucks, pretty gal, I’d sell to you if I could, but I just plain don’t got one. How’s about a copy of Hungry, Hungry Hippogryphs for half price?”

“No thank you,” Rarity said with a sigh.

Rarity left the store with her head hung low. Sweetie Belle had been asking for a Stitchwork Sadie for months, and Rarity had promised her parents she would find one in time for Sweetie’s birthday. She’d had all the time in the world to find one, but it had completely slipped her mind in a haze of rushed work orders and dangerous adventures. But, busy though she may have been, such a lapse in memory and judgment was truly inexcusable.

“I’m a terrible sister,” Rarity muttered dejectedly.

“Psssssssssst~”

Rarity’s head snapped up at the sudden hissing sound. It came again and she pinpointed it as coming from the shadowy alley to her left.

“Yes?” she called out cautiously of the darkness. “Hello?”

“Pssst, come down here,” a stallion’s raspy voice told her.

Rarity narrowed her eyes in suspicion. A memory of her youth came to mind, recalling a time when she was just a filly sitting on her daddy’s knee. “Now, listen up, honey,” he’d said, “if you ever find yourself being called down a darkened alleyway by a mysterious stranger’s voice… follow it! They probably have candy!”

“Oooooo~ candy!” she cooed. She shook her head vigorously. “No, wait, that’s stupid.”

She began trotting away in indifference to the voice, but was stopped by a second mysterious voice.

“Mama!”

Rarity turned in time to see the doll being pulled back into the shadows. Unless her eyes had been playing tricks, it had been the very doll she had been searching for.

“Well, this is ominous,” she sighed as she turned around, cast a weak lighting spell, and stepped into the alley.

The alley was as dark and filthy as one would expect it to be. Discarded boxes and dumpsters filled to overflowing were shoved haphazardly into the alley, making maneuvering difficult, and it may have been a trick of her hornlight but there seemed to be more than a few rats scurrying about.

“Well, well—“

“—would you look at that, brother of mine! It would seem that one of our friends from Ponyville—“

“—has come to pay us a visit at our new Manehattan location!”

Rarity brought her hoof to her face at the appearance of the two familiar brothers as they stepped out from behind a dumpster. They were a little worse for wear, very dirty, and their clothes could use a proper mending, but she would recognize those scam artists anywhere.

“The Flim-Flams?” she asked. “Aren’t you two in prison, yet?”

“Why we’re injured by your crass incarceration accusations!” shouted Flim.

“We’ll have you know that we simply detest these unfounded rumors of our arrest!” agreed Flam.

The pair of brother stood to break into song, only for Rarity to stand and stuff her hooves into their mouths to silence them.

“No,” she demanded firmly. “No singing. I don’t care.”

She levitated a sack of bits out of her saddlebags and plopped it onto the ground between them.

“Thirty bits,” she stated simply. “That’s a fifty-percent markup over retail. You will sell me this doll and our business will be completed.”

Flim and Flam shared a look of surprise. They shrugged and Flim’s horn shimmered with magic as the doll floated out from behind the dumpster.

Rarity took possession of her prize and inspected it with her most critical eye. It was a homely thing, but charmingly so, purposefully designed to look at though it were a patchwork of mismatched old scrap cloth. The stitching was adequate for something from a factory, and – most importantly – it didn’t have any sort of foul odor that might indicate that the toy had been purchased in an alley in lieu of a toy store.

“There are a few things we feel we should tell you before you go,” Flim said uneasily.

“Mhm,” Rarity muttered as continued the inspection.

“Certain supernatural things,” Flam continued.

“That’s nice,” she said as she stuffed the doll into her bags. She gave them a curt nod and turned to leave the alley. “I use the term loosely, but good day to you, gentlestallions.”

The pair conponies watched as the prissy mare left. Flim collected the bag of coins and gave it a shake next to his ear, counting the contents by the sound of clinking bits.

“Well, that was easy,” Flam said happily. “I thought we’d never get rid of that horrible thing.”

* * *

“This is the best birthday ever!” Sweetie Belle shouted as she hopped onto the kitchen table and bounced around the enormous cake Pinkie Pie had provided.

The assembled guests watched with happy smiles and clapping hooves as the little filly pranced joyfully around the cake. The guest list was just a small collection of Rarity and Sweetie’s friends, all crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the small dining room of the Carousel Boutique. Pinkie Pie had tried to invite the entire town, but Sweetie and Rarity both had agreed that an intimate gathering would be more enjoyable.

Sadly, their parents hadn’t made it to the party. They were out making final arrangements for Sweetie Belle’s secret birthday present: a trip to Disneigh World. It was going to be a week of excitement, roller coasters, and fatty amusement park foods. They’d be by later tonight, to pick her up and take a late train out of town.

“Do try and keep your hooves out of the frosting, dear,” Rarity said teasingly. “Some of our friends will be wanting some of that cake, as well.”

Pinkie Pie shoved her way to the front of the crowd and scoffed. “Pish-and-posh, Rarity, she can swim in that cake if she wants to, it’s her birthday, after all! I can always get more cake!”

The silly pink mare pulled a tray of cupcakes from her mane by way of proof of her claims and set it on the table, just outside the path of Sweetie’s giddy little dance.

“Yes, well, even still,” Rarity said with a laugh. “Now that Sweetie’s made her wish, how about we open presents before we start serving cake?”

Sweetie gasped excitedly and pumped her hoof in triumph. “Presents!”

Rarity levitated the cake into the kitchen to make space at the table. The pile of presents sitting in the corner quickly took the cake’s place and Sweetie descended upon the gifts like a hungry wolverine.

Scootaloo and Apple Bloom had gotten her a coloring book and some crayons. From Pinkie Pie she’d received a whole basket of rubber duckies, for some reason. Her gift from Applejack was jump rope. Next she received a small doll house from Fluttershy, a wooden tinker toy set from Rainbow Dash, and a tea set from Spike. Surprisingly, Twilight’s present wasn't a book – unsurprisingly, it was a calendar.

By the time she’d opened the final gift, Sweetie was practically drowning in discarded wrapping and new toys. She graciously thanked everypony politely, smiling the whole while, but there was a look of disappointment in her eyes that nopony missed.

“What’s wrong, Sweetie?” Rarity asked in feigned confusion. “Didn’t you get everything you wanted?”

Sweetie’s smile faltered for just a moment as she said: “Oh, yes! Everything! This was a perfect birthday!”

Rarity chuckled mischievously. “Oh, perfect was it? Then I suppose you won’t be needing this last present.”

A final gift box, tied with an enormous pink bow, floated in from the kitchen at Rarity’s command. She’d hidden it atop the fridge, in the spot where she normally hid the cookies when Sweetie or Pinkie were visiting.

Sweetie Belle leapt off the table, tackling the box to the ground before it even made it halfway to the table. She pulled the ribbon and yanked the wrapping away with her teeth, eager to get at the surprise. Off came the lid, and everypony in the room covered their ears to protect their delicate eardrums from Sweetie’s prepubescent screech of elation.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Sweetie shouted as she held her Stitchwork Sadie in her hooves. “Thank you, Rarity! This is the best birthday ever! Oh my gosh! I love her mane!”

The fillies in the room gathered around her to excitedly gush over the doll. They all took turns pulling the little string on her back, giggling at the various phrases the doll warbled through the tiny speaker-box hidden within.

As she looked around the room at the smiling faces of the guests, she realized that something wasn’t quite right. She sidled up to Twilight, the only pony in the room not smiling, and studied her face.

Twilight’s eyes were narrowed, her forehead creased in that odd thought-thinking way that ponies get when they’re deep in thought.

“Is there something wrong, Twilight?” Rarity asked in a whisper.

“That doll is… weird…”

“Yes, it’s very homely,” Rarity said with a laugh. “I mean, really, patchwork dolls? Hardly the sort of thing you go to a store for. I could’ve made her one ten times better.”

“No, that’s not it…” Twilight hummed. Her head snapped around and she shot Rarity a disapproving glare. “What’s wrong with patchwork dolls!? Smarty Pants was patchwork and she was my favorite toy!”

“Was Smarty Pants store bought?” Rarity asked.

“No, my gram-mammy made her,” Twilight said with a frown.

Rarity snickered behind her hoof at the adorably childish nickname for what she assumed was Twilight’s grandmother. “There you are, then. I’m simply saying that you’d expect something more finished-looking from a retail outlet.”

“All that aside,” Twilight groused. “That doll is weird. Mark my words, something is up with it. It’s probably incredibly evil.”

Spike emerged from the kitchen, wadding through the mass of children and mingling adults to sidle up next to Rarity and Twilight. He was holding a plate in his hands with a half-eaten slice of cake sitting atop it. “Yes, Twilight, the doll is evil,” Spike said through a mouth full of cake.

“I know evil when I see it,” Twilight said with conviction.

Spike sighed and turned to Rarity. “Rarity, where did you buy that doll?”

Rarity laughed nervously. “Erm, uh, hehe, well… it was a… a toy store?” she said with an unsure quirk of her eyebrow.

“Was it an evil toy store?” Spike continued.

“N-no,” Rarity answered with a shake of her head.

He turned back to Twilight and wagged his fork at her, inadvertently flicking cake crumbs into her face. “See? A toy store. Not even an evil one.”

Rarity slipped away from the quickly brewing storm. Spikey and Twilight may have been her dearest of friends, but it never paid to get between siblings in an argument. She was grateful for the distraction, anyway – she wouldn’t want anypony to find out where she really got that doll.

She turned back to the children and watched as Sweetie Belle and her friends took turns hugging the little doll. It may have been her imagination, but something in the face of that doll – whether it was the black buttons of its eyes or the two crooked lengths of yarn forming its smile – was deeply unsettling to her now.

* * *

Rarity turned off the shower and flicked the wet mane away from her face with a toss of her head. She opened the glass shower door and stepped onto the chilly wet tile of her bathroom with a pleasant shiver.

“Well, well,” she said with a wolfish whistle as she sauntered up to her full length mirror and wiped away the fog to admire herself. “Look at you, all damp and sexy. You sexy, dirty little kitten, you.”

She turned and wiggled her rump enticingly at herself. “Don’t you just drive all the boys wild, you filthy girl?”

She quickly spun around to pout at her reflection as she held a hoof to her lips coquettishly. “Oh, no, I’m just a cute, innocent little filly who wouldn’t do anything dirty,” she said, affecting a high-pitched tone that she had dubbed ‘the sexy baby voice’. “I wouldn’t even know how.”

“Innocent as a fox in a henhouse,” she cooed back to herself in a husky, sensual purr. “You’re so damned gorgeous you could get away with murder, couldn’t you?”

She giggled to herself and turned to the towel rack, only to recoil in shock as she found herself looking into the cold black eyes of Stitchwork Sadie.

“Luna on skiis!” she cursed. “Oh, you horrible little thing, what are you doing here? I thought Sweetie Belle took you with her.”

Rarity suddenly remembered that Sweetie had been asking for the doll when she was packing up her belongings. Rarity hadn’t seen it, and she’d been so preoccupied with cleaning up the party mess that she’d simply assumed that the doll had been located by the time their parents had arrived to pick her sister up.

Sadly, it now looked like Sweetie Belle would be enjoying the vacation without the company of the toy she’d coveted for so long.

“What was she doing in my bathroom?” Rarity asked the doll as she levitated it off the towel rack. “She knows she’s expressly forbidden from entering this bathroom after the incident with my fifty bit per ounce moisturizing crème.”

Rarity opened the bathroom door and tossed the doll onto the bed with a flick of her magic. She returned to her evening rituals of plucking, teasing, setting, and moisturizing where appropriate, before putting her hair in curlers.

She went back to the bedroom, got her nightgown out of the closet, and dressed for bed.

“What a trying few days this has been,” she muttered as she carefully wiggled her way under the covers, so as not to disturb the carefully tucked corners.

She promptly fell asleep once her sleeping mask was in place, and tired as she was, she never even noticed that the doll hadn’t been waiting on the bed where she’d left it.

* * *

“Ade. Due. Damballa.”

Rarity blinked tiredly beneath her sleeping mask. Somepony was outside, shouting or something, and it had woken her up. She decided to ignore it and closed her eyes to return to dreamland.

“Ade! Due! Damballa! Give me the power, I beg of you!”

“Really, now!” she shouted as she lifted her head and whipped her mask off. “Who could be making such a racket at this time of night!?”

“Go back to sleep,” Sadie commanded from her perch atop Rarity’s chest. She glared down at the mare with malevolent intent in her coal-black eyes.

“I’m sorry, but what?” Rarity asked quizzically.

“I said go back to sleep!” the doll demanded. It reached up to try and pull the sleep mask back over Rarity’s eyes, hoping that she would conk back out like a canary in a covered bird cage.

Rarity slapped the doll’s little hooves away and frowned. “No, I heard that, I’m asking what, in the largest sense, is going on here?”

Sadie snickered darkly. “You foolish girl. You foolish, beautiful idiot.”

“Hey!” Rarity shouted indignantly. Surprised or not, she wouldn’t stand for being insulted by a foal's toy, of all things.

“You poor, foolish, stupid, dumb, dumb, gorgeous idiot,” the doll said, continuing its diatribe despite Rarity’s seething ire. “I am Stitchwork Sadie, the greatest murderer that has ever lived.”

“You’re making progressively less sense,” Rarity said. She tried to sit up but the doll bounced on her chest and leaned forward in a disarmingly cute attempt to hold her down. The sight of the creepily adorable act was enough to do the trick, and Rarity lay there, blinking owlishly at the doll as it cackled into her face. It was vaguely unsettling to have it speaking without a moving mouth, but as the voice was coming from its butt, Rarity assumed that whatever was controlling the doll was probably speaking through the toy’s voice box.

“You don’t need to make sense of this,” the doll said menacingly. “I am going to take over your body with an evil spell, and then once my dark ritual is complete, I will use that beautiful vessel to go on a killing spree the likes of which Equestria has never seen!”

“You’ll never get away with it,” Rarity said with a grin, her initial shock giving way to amusement at the absurdity of the situation.

“Oh, I will,” Sadie whispered eerily. “You said it yourself. You’re so damned gorgeous that you could get away with murder.”

Rarity chortled with unrestrained giddiness. “Wait, are you talking about what I said when I was in the bathroom? That’s just a turn of phrase!”

Sadie stared in silence for a moment before asking: “A what now?”

Rarity sat up and the doll tumbled away. It rose into a sitting position in the center of the bed, still staring in confusion.

“A turn of phrase," Rarity struggled to elaborate. "It’s idiomatic. It’s… it’s just a saying.”

“So…” Sadie asked softly. “So you’re saying you’re not beautiful enough to get away with murder?”

Rarity shrugged and played with her curlers thoughtfully. “Ehhhhh, maybe? I suppose if I played up the sympathy angle – did a lot of crying and fluttering my eyelashes – I could maybe get away with it. Of course the odds go way up if it’s an all-male jury. Most mares are immune to that sort of doe-eyed manipulation, even from mares they find attractive. Stallions always fall it, though. I don’t know why…”

“Right, so then I should steal your body then,” Sadie surmised.

“I would quite go that far,” Rarity said with a laugh.

“I’m going to do it anyway.”

Rarity groaned tiredly and whipped off her sleeping mask. “Oh, enough is enough.”

Rarity’s magic pulled an empty hat box down from the top of her dresser and plopped it on the bed. She removed the lid and scooped the doll into the container before it could even react. The lid went back on and was secured with a belt from one of her bathrobes.

“Hey, what’re you doing, you crazy bitch!?” it screamed as it beat its tiny cloth hooves against the inside of the hatbox.

“I’m taking you to Twilight,” Rarity explained as she tidied up the impromptu bow atop the box and then went about removing her curlers. “She knew something was wrong and we’re going to get this taken care of straight away.”

“This isn’t how it was supposed to go!” Sadie shouted. The hat box shook angrily as the evil toy thrashed around within. “I am the greatest murderer that has ever lived!”

“Please,” Rarity scoffed. “You’re a doll. You’re made of stuffing and scrap cloth. What did you think was going to happen? You’d chase me all around the house and then put a kitchen knife in my back? The very idea is laughably absurd.”

* * *

“I told you so.”

Rarity leaned against the desk in Twilight’s study and yawned sleepily. “I know you did, that’s why I brought it here. What do you want to hear? You want me to admit that you were right? Is that it?”

Twilight scuffed at the polished crystal floors of her palace’s new study and blushed brightly. “Maybe…” she said timidly.

“Fine,” Rarity said, “you were right, and I was wrong. The doll was evil.”

Twilight smiled brightly and trotted over to a pile of correspondence that Owloysius was sorting through.

“It’s a good thing that I took the initiative to look into the matter as soon as I got home,” Twilight said smugly.

“I’ll kill you all!” Sadie shouted from within a birdcage in the middle of Twilight’s floor. She’d locked the thing up and drawn a magic circle around it the moment Rarity explained what was in the box she was carrying.

“Of course you will,” Twilight answered dismissively. She activated the magic circle, bringing the silencing charm online and leaving Sadie to rage soundlessly against the bars of her prison.

“Owloysius,” Twilight said as she turned to her owl. “Please go and fetch Spike. He’s probably asleep already. Just tell him that Rarity’s here if he’s being slow about it. I’m sure that’ll wake him up.”

The little owl saluted and obediently flew off towards Spike’s room.

“So what did you find out, darling?” Rarity asked.

“I got a letter from the manufacturer,” Twilight began as she flipped through the paperwork until she found the envelope she was looking for.

“How did you get a response so quickly?”

“Royal messengers,” Twilight said simply. “Ponies tend to respond quickly when a messenger is standing in front of them flashing a royal seal and waiting for the response.”

“Impressive,” Rarity said.

Twilight read through the letter with a slowly deepening scowl. “This is not good…”

“Don’t leave me in suspense, Twilight, darling.”

“Apparently every now and again they get dolls like this,” Twilight explained. “Quality control catches them most of the time, but sometimes they slip through. Apparently the company they outsource their scrap cloth from accidentally included scraps from an old abandoned psychiatric hospital for criminally insane ponies. Some of the old straight-jackets got chopped up and mixed in with the cloth shipment.”

“Oh dear…” Rarity said nervously. She looked at the doll and tried to discern which part of its body must have been the accursed cloth-piece.

“Also, one of the factory workers fell into the machinery and got ground up,” Twilight continued. “They say his malevolent spirit is still haunting the factory.”

Rarity got a little green at the thought of the mess that must have been. “Ew…”

Twilight sat on her haunches and massaged her temples as she read. “Then the owners of the factory ran afoul of a bunch of gypsy ponies – something about bank loans or a carriage accident or something. The manager that responded to me isn’t sure exactly what went on there, but she says that whatever happened, the gypsies put a curse on the factory.”

“How dreadful.”

“The curse didn’t take, though…”

“That’s good news, at least.”

“…because of all the residual energy left over from when the factory grounds were the site of horrific demon worshipping rituals with live virgin sacrifices.”

“Really, now!” Rarity shouted. “Now you’re just being silly!”

“No, really!” Twilight said as she held out the letter for Rarity.

The flustered fashionista took the letter with her magic, her lips moving as she read silently to herself. She frowned and looked up from the letter with a pained groan. “I always knew retail was evil…”

“It’s not a big deal, Rarity,” Twilight assured her friend. “It’s just a doll, it’s harmless. It has no muscles, just stuffing. They said all we have to do is send it back, and when they roll out another batch of dolls, they’ll send us a non-cursed one.”

“That is not an option,” Rarity declared. “Sweetie Belle will be home in a week, and the stallion I spoke to at the toy store said that the next shipment of Stitchwork Sadie dolls wouldn’t arrive for a few months. This doll was all she really wanted for her birthday, and I won’t deny her heart’s desire just because I was negligent and ended up having to buy a toy from the Flim-Flams in a darkened alleyway.”

“Wait, what was that about an alley and Flim-Flams?”

“Nothing,” Rarity quickly answered. “You’re hearing things.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes and hummed suspiciously. “Hmmm… yes… I must be…”

She turned back to the magic circle and frowned. Sadie had taken to sulking against the bars of her cage, her arms crossed over her chest. If she had full range of motion for her mouth, Twilight was sure Sadie would be frowning right back at her.

“I suppose we can uncurse it,” Twilight reasoned. “Problem is that the evil spirit inhabiting the doll has tainted it. That energy would only attract more malevolent beings, so exorcising the spirit would only leave room for another spirit to enter the host-body.”

“What do we do then?” Rarity asked anxiously.

“I suppose we could…” Twilight trailed off, scratching her chin in thought as she formulated a plan. “We could exorcise the evil spirit and then put a benign spirit in its place. But it would have to be a pure spirit, from somepony good and noble, somepony filled with love. If the benign spirit inhabited the doll for… say five or so days, it would cleanse the evil energy.”

“Yes! Let’s do that!” Rarity said eagerly.

“Hold on, there,” Twilight said with a chuckle. “The question is: who is going to volunteer to spend almost a full week living inside of a doll? Nopony’s that stupid.”

There was a clamor in the hallway as something ran into a podium, knocking over a vase and sending it crashing to the floor. A moment later Spike burst in through the door, a wide grin on his face as he beheld his beloved.

“Rarity!” he shouted. If he noticed Twilight or the curious sight of a caged and magically bound toy, he didn’t give any indication of it.

Twilight held a hoof to her face as she realized what was moments away from happening.

Rarity leaned forward and smiled at Spike the way a snake smiles at a mouse.

“My cutesy-iddle-widdle Spikey! Just the gentledrake I needed… how would you like to spend a few days sleeping over at my house?” she asked, fluttering her eyelashes in that way that males always seemed to fall for.

* * *

No Means Nosferatu

The sky above Ponyville was overcast.

This, in and of itself, wasn’t a wholly uncommon sight. What was uncommon was the fact that it had been overcast for the past several days in a row.

Sweetie Belle sighed as she stood in the kitchen doorway of the Carousel Boutique, alternating between looking up at the sky and checking the weather schedule pinned to the bulletin board on the wall. The pegasi usually kept the skies pretty clear, but for some odd reason they were keeping the skies cloudy for the foreseeable future.

The dainty clop of hooves on linoleum alerted her to Rarity’s approach.

“Sweetie,” her sister called with a cluck of her tongue. “Shouldn’t you be going? It’s the first day of school.”

“I’m wondering if I should bring an umbrella,” Sweetie Belle said, still staring at the gloomy skies. She unconsciously reached up to check her carefully curled mane at the thought of potential downpour.

Rarity came up from behind and gave Sweetie Belle a little push on the rump with her hoof. “That shouldn’t be necessary,” she said. “Rainbow Dash assured me that there wouldn’t be any rain any time soon.”

“But then why are there clouds if we’re not expecting rain?”

“Apparently Cloudsdale is sending us their cloud overflow, and we’re not allowed to pop them because Ponyville is now a designated cloud reservoir,” Rarity said with a gentle laugh. “Rainbow Dash said it was a paperwork snafu, but Twilight asked around and it seems that our new designation was because of a meeting of the weather managers in Cloudsdale. Rainbow Dash missed it due to some unscheduled napping, so we drew the short stick and are stuck with the extra clouds for a few months until Twilight can get it all sorted.”

“At least it’s in autumn,” Sweetie said optimistically.

“Yes, it is the season for this sort of weather. Now off to school. I don’t want word getting back to mom and dad that you were late to your first day while under my watch.”

Sweetie slipped on her school bags left for school, stopping a bit down the road to turn back and wave her sister back into the house that was now her permanent home. Their parents had recently moved to Las Pegasus so their father could begin his new career as a blackjack dealer, leaving Rarity to care for her sister on a more permanent basis. They’d wanted Sweetie Belle to make the move with them, but neither she nor Rarity had wanted to be separated, and Sweetie Belle wanted to finish school in Ponyville with her friends.

It wasn’t too great of an inconvenience, anyway, as Sweetie Belle already had a room in Rarity’s house, given their parents’ penchant for long vacation tours. The only difference was that Rarity was now being very… sisterly. Sweetie Belle rather suspected that Rarity wanted to prove herself as a ‘cool’ big sister, and was being a bit more laid back than she might have normally been. While it wasn’t exactly a bad thing, it was a little weird.

“Hey, Sweetie!”

Sweetie Belle flinched away as Scootaloo zipped by on her scooter close enough to nudge her saddlebag. The little orange pegasus turned sharply a few feet ahead, going into a power slide that kicked up dust in a billowing cloud.

“Hey, Scootaloo,” Sweetie Belle said with a cough. She backed up a bit to avoid the cloud of dust as it slowly dispersed and settled. “You ready for the first day of school?”

“I guess,” Scootaloo said, sighing as she dug a hoof into her ear crudely. “I didn’t get any of my summer reading done, though.”

“That’s just like you to go forgettin’ the only thing that you had to do all summer,” Apple Bloom chided as she trotted up to them from an intersecting road. “You’re lazier than a dog in a corn field.”

“What the heck does a dog in a corn field have to do with laziness?” Scootaloo asked.

“It’s one of the books we had to read this summer,” Sweetie Belle answered as she stuck her head into her school bags. She removed a small novella, clinched between her teeth, and tapped at the title on the cover: The Curious Case of the Dog in the Corn Field.

Scootaloo groaned into her hooves with the despair of the unprepared. “I’m going to get an F today, aren’t I?”

The trio of friends walked to class, full of that strange mix of trepidation and excitement that accompanied every ‘first day’ since their first. Along the way their little group grew, picking up more foals as they went like a snowball rolling downhill. Some additions they said hello to and invited into the conversations, others had their own little groups among the crowd and kept to themselves.

“Has anypony seen Button Mash?” asked Snips of the crowd at large. “We just passed his house and he usually sits on the stoop waiting to walk with us to school.”

There was a general murmur as the foals conferred amongst themselves.

“He’s probably not back from vacation yet,” Featherweight offered helpfully. The skinny little pegasus colt rummaged in his bag and produced a small notepad. The other children watched as he flipped through until he found a specific page. “According to the interview he gave for the yearbook, he was spending the summer visiting his grandpa in buffalo country.”

Apple Bloom’s ear perked at the mention of buffalos. “He’s got kin in Appleloosa?” she asked, knowing that her extended family’s newest homestead was the only pony settlement that shared buffalo territory.

“Nope,” Featherweight answered as he slipped the notes back into his bag. “I think he really meant buffalo country.”

“Huh, never would’ve reckoned he’d be part buffalo,” Apple Bloom said with a shrug.

* * *

Miss Cheerilee had been waiting outside to greet the children as they entered the schoolhouse, and had directed them all to a seating chart she’d taped to the chalkboard. Sweetie Belle found her seat and settled herself in with a huff.

She’d been assigned the seat in the very back corner of the room, isolated from Apple Bloom and Scootaloo, who took opposing corners. It was annoying, but understandable, as she and the other two Crusaders tended to distract one another. What wasn’t understandable was why she had to get Twist’s old desk.

Sweetie Belle frowned and lifted the lid of the desk to get at the storage compartment. The wood separated with a sticky sort of tearing noise, and the sweet scent of stale candy blasted into her face. The odor was also mixed with the usual smell of wood and paste that all the desks had, along with a hint of lemon-scented furniture cleaner. The lemon-scent, she surmised, was probably from Miss Cheerilee’s fruitless attempts to clean away whatever mess the desk’s sticky candy addict of a previous owner had left behind.

She ran a hoof along the inside of the compartment. Despite the smell, her hoof came up unstickified, so she stowed her bag and shut the hatch.

As she looked around she noticed that to her right was an empty seat, directly in front of her was one of Diamond Tiara’s little followers, and on her left was the window overlooking the playground. She sighed as she realized that she would probably be spending the year without anypony to talk with for the remainder of the year, unless Cheerilee decided to rearrange the seating chart.

The bell rang, signaling the start of class, and a minute or two later Cheerilee trotted in, smiling brightly at all of her students.

“Good morning, everypony,” she greeted them cheerfully. “I know you’re all eager to jump right into the first day of learning, but before we get those brain cells firing again, we have a little bit of news.”

The collective buzz of the students trying to finish up conversations before the start of class ceased at the mention of some sort of news. All eyes were forward as Cheerilee waved at something outside the classroom, beckoning it inside.

A handsome earth pony colt entered at her summons. The colt had a ghostly-pale yellow coat, a jet black mane, and a Cutie Mark of a slice of plain white bread. The fillies in the room gasped in unison as he strode into the room with an unworldly grace, while all the colts scoffed and whispered contemptuously to one another.

“This is Fang Coven,” Cheerilee explained happily. “His family just moved to Ponyville and he’ll be joining us this year. Fang, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself?”

The fillies were all on the edge of their seats, listening to him with rapt attention. All except Sweetie Belle, who flicked her ears in thought as she tried to put her hoof on what was giving her weird vibes about this boy. He was gorgeous, to be sure, but he was also… weird.

The colt stared straight ahead, unblinking, and cleared his throat. “My name is Fang Coven,” he said. “My family just moved to Ponyville and I’ll be joining you this year.”

Sweetie blinked. Even his voice was odd. He spoke in a slow, barely audible monotone like he was reading from a script, and reading from it badly. Or maybe he was trying to hide an accent? Either way, it was very unpleasant to listen to his voice.

Cheerilee chuckled uncomfortably. “Okay, so you’re a little shy, that’s understandable,” she said with a nod. She pointed to one of the only two empty seats in the room. “Why don’t you have a seat at the back next to Sweetie Bell?”

Diamond Tiara stood on her seat, waving her arm around frantically.

“Yes, Diamond Tiara?”

“He can sit next to me!” Diamond Tiara said, fluttering her eyelashes innocently.

“I’m sorry, but we only have two empty seats in the class, and I’ve already assigned Button Mash to that seat. His mother sent word that his trip was extended, but he should be joining us in a few days.”

“But-but-but…!”

“No buts!” Cheerilee said firmly. She reached up to the chalkboard and tapped the seating chart resolutely. “The chart is already made up and the chart is law.”

Fang ignored the exchange and trotted down the aisle to the seat he was assigned. He stowed away his bag and sat with his arms folded on the desk, staring blankly ahead as Cheerilee began taking attendance.

Sweetie Belle blushed a little. Unpleasant voice or no, he was nice eye candy, at least.

“Hi, my name’s Sweetie Belle,” she whispered to him.

“I know,” he said monotonically.

Sweetie frowned and tried again. “Do you… like school?”

He nodded broodingly.

She sighed and turned to the window, keeping one ear forward to listen for her name. It looked like her earlier assumption would prove correct: there wouldn’t be anypony to talk to all year.

* * *

The first day of school had been pretty uneventful. Cheerilee did her usual start-of-the-year thing, getting everypony on the same page and collecting summer homework, and Diamond Tiara had already begun circulating mean notes around class.

There had been a little excitement during lunch when all the fillies in class rushed to Fang’s desk to fawn over him while he slowly ate an apple. Sweetie Belle had been tossed aside by the wave of lovestruck fillies in their haste to get at the object of their affections. Surprisingly, even Apple Bloom and Scootaloo seemed smitten, so Sweetie Belle had eaten lunch alone.

They hadn’t even gotten any crusading done, since the only thing Scootaloo and Apple Bloom wanted to talk about was stupid boys. Puberty was a bitch riding into town on a pale horse, and that horse’s name was Fang Coven.

Sadly, it seemed that the second day of school wouldn‘t be any better than the first.

“Alright, my little ponies,” Cheerilee said cheerfully. “As I told you yesterday, Tuesdays this year are going to be our arts and crafts days.”

The children chattered excitedly at the prospect of a morning free of actual learning.

“For today’s project I want all of you to work in pairs,” Cheerilee explained as she went to her desk and grabbed a stack of papers. She placed them on her back and began walking up and down the aisles so the children could grab one as she passed. “Just go ahead and scoot your desks together with your neighbor and that’ll be your art-buddy for the rest of the year, okay?”

Sweetie Belle snagged one of the worksheets and groaned as she realized who her partner would be.

“I guess we’re partners,” Fang said to her as he pushed their desks together.

“Looks that way,” Sweetie Belle said, flashing him a forced smile. “Okay, so it looks like we need… macaroni, paste, glitter, some popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners… wow, we’re just using everything, aren’t we?”

She very suddenly was aware of something warm and slightly damp against her neck. She looked up from her desk and was startled to find Fang’s nose inches from her head. His eyes were closed and his nostrils flared as he breathed deeply.

“You smell wonderful…” he whispered with whitewashed seduction.

“Thank you, but personal space, please,” she told him nervously. “And I think you’re just smelling my desk... It smells like candy.”

He snorted and inhaled deeply again.

“Stop that,” she demanded. "Please, just stop sniffing me, I don't like it."

He shrunk away at the tone in her voice and quietly left his seat to find the materials listed on their worksheet.

The sound of snapping wood drew her attention to Diamond Tiara, who held the remnants of a broken pencil between her teeth as she glared daggers at Sweetie Belle. All around her were scowling fillies and snickering colts making kissy faces at her.

* * *

The day had gone about as bad Sweetie Belle had expected. After everypony in class had seen Fang putting the moves on her, she’d been on the receiving end of spitwads, catcalls, and stupid rhymes about sitting in trees for certain lip related activities.

Sweetie had decided that hiding in the classroom was the better part of valor, and stuck around for a while after the bell had rung so that the crowd of angry fillies outside could disperse. She wasn’t afraid of getting beaten up or anything, but she definitely didn’t want to walk the gauntlet of bitchy fillies coughing “Slut!” into their hooves.

Luckily, her friendship with Apple Bloom and Scootaloo transcended mundane trivialities like boys and jealousy. The other two crusaders were actually pretty happy that she was getting attention from such a cute boy. Never mind the fact that it was unwanted attention, but still, it was very sweet of them.

“I can’t believe that guy was sniffing you!” Scootaloo shouted excitedly as she bounced around, her tiny wings vibrating energetically as the trio walked home.

“You and me both,” Sweetie replied as she mimed gagging.

“Is he really so bad?” Apple Bloom asked with a chuckle. “He’s downright pretty. If you don’t want him I wouldn’t mind if you’d put a good word in my way.”

“He was sniffing me!” Sweetie exclaimed. “I can’t believe I have to explain why that’s creepy!”

“It’s not creepy if the guy is hot,” Scootaloo said sagely.

“Creepy is as creepy does, Scootaloo,” Sweetie Belle scoffed.

“Oh, sure, you can say that,” Apple Bloom said with a roll of her eyes. “It’s not like it’s the first time a boy has ever sniffed your mane. I reckon it must be getting’ so tirin’ to be gettin’ sniffed all the time.”

“And when Button did that everypony agreed it was creepy!” Sweetie Belle pointed out.

“But only because Button Mash isn’t hot,” Scootaloo countered. “He’s a dork. A Megadorkasaurus Rex. King of the Thunder Dorks.”

“Aw, come on, he’s not that bad looking,” Sweetie Belle said. “And he’s our friend. It’s not nice to talk about a friend like that.”

“He’s our friend but that doesn’t make him any less of a dork,” Scootaloo said.

Apple Bloom shrugged and kicked a pebble against an old tin can lying in the road. “I reckon he’d be okay if he’d put a little meat on that flank. Couple seasons of apple buckin’ would take that boy from giddy-nope to giddy-up.”

“Can we please stop talking about boys?” Sweetie Belle pleaded. “I really need to get my mind off creepy jerks, so can’t we do some crusading today?”

“I can’t,” Scootaloo mumbled sadly. “I got grounded because I got an F on the first day… I’m supposed to head straight home.”

“And I gotta help jar up some of Granny’s preserves for the winter,” Apple Bloom said with a sigh. “Plus, we had to move up Apple Buckin’ season because we ain’t goin’ to be gettin’ any sunshine between now and first snowfall, so there’s a lot of apples that need storin’.”

“Fiiiiiiiiiine!” Sweetie Belle groaned as she tossed her head back in exasperation. “When are you guys free?”

“Weekend?” Scootaloo asked Apple Bloom with an inquiring tilt of her head.

“Weekend,” Apple Bloom confirmed with eager cheer. “Sweetie?”

Sweetie Belle sighed and hung her head dejectedly. “Weekend, then.”

Her friends patted her on the back sympathetically and ran off in separate directions, leaving Sweetie Belle alone to walk the long, dreary path home. It was the middle of the day but it seemed that most ponies preferred to spend their time indoors, considering the inclement weather. Here and there she found a few ponies shoring up storm windows or cleaning gutters in anticipation of rain that never came, but for the most part the streets were empty.

She made it back to the boutique and walked around the long way to enter through the kitchen rather than the front entrance. It was still business hours and she didn’t want to disturb Rarity if she was working.

She dropped her bag by the kitchen door and went to the fridge, rummaging around for a snack. As she reached for an apple that had rolled to the back of the fridge, she nudged a precariously placed plastic bowl, dropping it to the ground with a clatter.

“Ah, shoot,” she cursed as she watched a few loose grapes scatter across the kitchen floor.

“Sweetie?” Rarity called from the showroom. “Is that you?”

“Yeah!” Sweetie Belle called back. She began picking up her mess, dropping the grapes into the bowl one at a time. Not for the first time, she wished she had better control of her magic, if only for situations like this.

Rarity entered just as Sweetie Belle was emptying the bowl into the trash can.

“Ooopsie, made a mess, did we?” she teased.

“Yeah, sorry, I already got it cleaned,” Sweetie Belle said as she tossed the bowl into the sink and went back to the fridge to get that apple.

Rarity pulled a few glasses from the cupboards and retrieved a pitcher of iced tea from the fridge. “How was school?”

“It was fine,” Sweetie Belle answered sourly as she hopped onto a chair at the kitchen table.

“It doesn’t sound like it was fine.”

Sweetie Belle bit into her apple and chewed deliberately. “I guess… maybe it wasn’t that fine…”

Rarity poured their drinks and took a seat across from her. She gave her best, most sisterly smile, and asked, “Want to talk about it?”

“Remember that boy I said just moved to town?”

“That would be the one sitting next to you in class?”

“That’s him,” Sweetie Belle said with a nod. “Today was arts and crafts day, and Cheerilee made us partners.”

Rarity gasped and began fanning herself with a hoof. “Oh, my goodness, is this going where I think it is going? Do you really have your first crush?”

Sweetie Belle’s eyes went wide in panic and she almost choked on the bit of apple in her mouth. She swallowed roughly and washed it down with a harsh gulp of tea. “What!? No!”

Rarity’s giddiness deflated like a popped balloon. “Oh… well then… whatever could the problem be?”

“He’s weird!”

“But I thought you said he was very handsome.”

Sweetie Belle gaped at her sister’s glib response. “Just because he’s good looking doesn’t mean he’s not weird!”

“I suppose…” Rarity said as she sipped her tea. “How weird are we talking? I mean, a certain level of… shall we say ‘eccentricity’… is to be forgiven for beautiful ponies.”

“He was sniffing my mane!” Sweetie Belle shouted incredulously. She could hardly believe what she was hearing. She expected that sort of hoofwaving from hormonal teenaged fillies like her friends, but Rarity was a mature adult mare, worldly in the ways of love.

Rarity tittered girlishly. “Yes, they do that, don’t they?”

“W-what?”

Rarity leaned forward, smiling that condescending smile that adults smiled when they were about to talk down to children.

“Sweetie,” she said gently. “It may be time for you to learn the truth about boys... and that truth is that they are all idiots.”

Sweetie Belle blinked in confusion. “Excuse me?”

“Idiots, dear,” Rarity repeated kindly, “especially when it comes to beautiful mares. That is doubly so for the mares in our family. The ladies of our bloodline have always had a certain hold over males. It is something a gift and a curse.”

Rarity sniffled and wiped away a stray tear of pride. “Oh, look at you. You are growing up so fast. You are becoming a mare right before my very eyes.”

“So… because I’m hot… I should expect boys to sniff my mane…?”

“Well, you should not be surprised by it, at the very least,” Rarity said with a wave of her hoof.

Sweetie Belle tossed her half-eaten apple into the garbage can with a deft flick of her hoof and climbed off her chair. “I need to lie down, I think. This day has been too stupid for my tastes.”

* * *

The third day of school came and went, and Sweetie Belle was glad to see the end of it. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon had passed around some extra mean notes about her after lunch, and Fang kept casting sidelong glances at her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking. He also seemed to keep trying to smell her from a distance, if the amount of huffing and puffing he was doing during class was any indication.

She had stayed after class again to let the Fang-groupies disperse, but unlike the previous day she’d been waiting alone, as Scootaloo and Apple Bloom had both trundled off home to their respective punishments and chores. They’d gotten in trouble the day before for staying behind so late, so she couldn’t really blame them, but it still would’ve been nice to have somepony to wait around with.

Cheerilee had asked why she was sticking around after class, so Sweetie just pulled out her homework and made up a story about Rarity being very noisy when she was in the throes of creative passion. The teacher merely shrugged and went about grading her papers.

Once the coast was clear, Sweetie Belle packed up her things and waved goodbye to Cheerilee. A quick peek out the door confirmed that it was safe to leave and she headed for home. Just as she was passing a small wooded area, she heard a voice.

“Hello, Sweetie Belle…”

The voice hit Sweetie Belle like a splash of cold water to the face. She turned to the trees and glared into the shadows as Fang emerged from his hiding spot. His bland, impassively handsome face was suddenly terrifying when she wasn’t within reach of an adult or one of her friends.

“Just so you know, I have a rape whistle in my bag, and if you try anything I will blow it so loud that… that you don’t even know how loud I’ll blow it,” she threatened shakily.

“Don’t worry, I’m not here to hurt you,” he said as he stalked forward, a glimmer of something mad in his eye.

“That’s not something you should have to point out,” Sweetie Belle told him as she backed away slowly. “If somepony points out that they’re not here to hurt you, it probably means that hurting you has crossed their mind at some point.”

“W-what…?” Fang asked. He growled slightly and shook his head. “No, I’m just here because there’s something I want you to see.”

“…it’s not your wiener, is it…?”

Fang closed the distance between them before she could even blink. Sweetie Belle was swept up and tossed across Fang’s back like a sack of potatoes – helpless and wide-eyed, like a potato.

Fang carried her off into the woods, zooming between tree trunks and over fallen logs at breakneck speeds. Eventually, Sweetie Belle found enough of her wits to start screaming as they tore through Whitetail Woods.

They continued on like that for several minutes, until they finally came to a clearing in the woods and Fang set Sweetie Belle back down. Her legs buckled beneath the sudden load of her own weight, dropping her face first into the damp earth. She stood drunkenly and began digging in her bag for her whistle.

“Sweetie Belle, look at me,” Fang commanded sternly.

“Get bucked,” she replied, even more sternly.

“I mean it, look at me.”

She looked up from her bag and glared at him with every ounce of anger she could muster. Who did he think he was? Picking her up and carrying her into the woods… all alone… probably to try and do dirty stuff to her…

He met her glare with a soft, almost pitiable expression. His usual insipid mask of bland indifference was handsome, but something about the tiny bit of emotion bleeding through that mask pulled at her heartstrings. It was like seeing a bunny in a bear-trap. A handsome bunny, with a chiseled jawline and piercing gray eyes the color of a rainy sky…

The twinge of emotion was quickly crushed beneath the fact that Fang, though pleasant to look at, was a creepazoid of the highest degree and magnitude.

He took a step forward.

She took two backwards.

“Don’t be afraid,” he soothed. “I’d never hurt you.”

“Who’s afraid?” she snapped angrily. “I’m not afraid. I have connections – powerful, royal connections. If you tried anything with me they’d need a rocket ship to find the place your body was buried.”

He didn’t flinch at the threat, or maybe he didn’t understand it, but he continued speaking, heedless of her outburst.

“My family and I aren’t like other ponies…” he whispered sadly.

“Oh, are they freaky foalnapping mane-sniffers, too?” she asked sarcastically.

“We’re faster than other ponies…” he explained as he zoomed away almost too quickly to be seen, his body becoming a blurred outline zipping across the clearing to stand atop a huge fallen log.

“Rainbow Dash is faster,” Sweetie Belle scoffed. “Heck, even Scootaloo is faster if she’s on her scooter.”

“We’re stronger than other ponies!” he shouted as he reared up and brought his front hooves down on the log, splitting it in half with a crack like thunder.

“Pfffffffft, Apple Bloom’s sister Applejack could do that with one leg.”

At that moment, whether by coincidence or providence – probably coincidence – there was a break in the dense blanket of clouds that had hung overhead for over a week. Fang trotted over to the single shaft of bright sunlight breaking through the gloom. He stepped into the beam of pure light, standing on his hind legs with his arms spread wide as his coat glittered in the sun like a thousand twinkling lights. He stood proudly before her – his entire body a living prism refracting every color of the rainbow – and grinned triumphantly.

“So?”

He dropped back to his hooves and tilted his head in confusion. “I’m sorry? Did you not see me shimmering in the sunlight?”

“Yeah,” Sweetie Belle said with an unimpressed raise of her eyebrow. “Have you not met Pinkie Pie yet? Bubbly pink mare, probably threw you a welcome party, smells like cupcakes. She sparkles in the sunshine just like that. I’m not sure how it works, but I think she sweats glitter. Like, literally glitter from her pores.”

“I’m a vampire!” he barked in frustration.

“No, you’re not,” Sweetie Belle said. “If you’re a vampire then why isn’t the sunlight killing you? Sunlight sets vampires on fire.”

“That only happens in books,” Fang explained with a weary sigh, as though it was an old question that he’d fielded a thousand times before. “Real vampires only shy away from the sunlight because it causes our coats to sparkle, giving away our vampiric nature. As long as we stay out of the sunlight, we can pass for regular ponies, just like everypony else.”

“That’s stupid,” Sweetie Belle said, laughing. “That’s the lamest thing ever.”

Fang groaned and stepped out of the sunlight. He plopped on the ground and turned his head away bashfully. “Look, I just brought you out here to show you my secret... so that you know why our love can never be.”

“Yeah, that’s why our love can never be,” Sweetie Belle said with a roll of her eyes. “That’s the exact reason.”

“You’re going to have to forget about me,” Fang told her. “I’m a predator, and I’m not sure I can control myself around you. I’m too dangerous for us to be together.”

“You’re a lot of things, but I think dangerous is relatively at the bottom of the list as far as I'm concerned.”

Fang was so engrossed in his own maudlin monologue that he never even took notice of Sweetie Belle’s comments. “Forget about the feelings beating within your breast, the love within your breast so powerful that it threatens to burst through your breast. I have to stay away from you, and we can never see each other again.”

Sweetie Belle grimaced like she’d just bitten into a whole lemon. “Gah! Yes! Please! And stop talking about my breast while you’re at it!”

She quickly turned and ran as fast as she could in the direction they’d come from.

Fang sat in the clearing, the wind whipping through his mane, as tears fell down his face.

“I’ll never forget you, Sweetie Belle…”

* * *

Sweetie Belle sat up in bed with a yawn. It was still dark out, or at least she guessed it was. It wasn’t exactly easy to tell with how cloudy the skies had been lately.

She yawned again and scratched lazily at her side. For some unfathomable reason her night’s sleep had been somewhat restless. Surely it couldn’t have anything to do with the disturbing revelation that there was a blood sucking wraith prowling the streets – prowling the streets when it wasn’t Tuesdays, that is, since Tuesdays were the days that she and the Tartarus-spawn were making macaroni fire-engines.

She pushed those thoughts aside. That didn’t matter. The crazy idiot thought there was some kind of love connection between them – when there clearly wasn’t – but he said he was going to back off out of a truly misguided need to protect her from himself. That suited her just fine and was quite a load off her mind.

What was actually far more disturbing was the fact that Rarity had shrugged off the news that there was such a beast in Ponyville. Sweetie Belle had assumed that if anypony would hop-to and start rousing the rabble to get their pitchforks and torches, it’d be one of the Elements of Harmony – a group of mares that more or less had the royally appointed monopoly on protecting Equestria’s citizens from supernatural bugaboos.

But no, Rarity just tittered that infuriatingly patronizing little titter of hers and said she’d have a word with Twilight about it, all the while muttering under her breath something about fruit bats, Fluttershy, and relapses. Either way, Sweetie Belle had done exactly what Rarity had said to do if she saw something suspiciously evil, and told her about it straight away. Eventually a chicken would go missing or a pony’s mangled, desiccated corpse would be found dangling from a weather vane or something, and the situation would get handled. It wasn’t her problem anymore. Her conscience was clean.

Sweetie Belle was about to lie back down but noticed that her pillow was no longer behind her. She decided that if she was going to be getting to sleep, she’d probably need to locate it. She rubbed at her sensitive eyes as they attempted to readjust to the near pitch black darkness of the room and began searching for the errant cushion.

“Where did that stupid pillow go…?” she mumbled as she peered over the edge of the bed.

She felt something tap the top of her head and looked up to find her pillow being held out to her. Her sleep deprived mind didn’t register the queerness of the situation, so she grabbed the pillow, fluffed it a few times, and laid back down with a quick, “Thanks a bunch,” to the mysterious being that had offered the pillow to her.

“You’re welcome,” Fang told her.

Sweetie Belle pulled the blankets tight against her chin and yawned once more, settling herself back into Luna’s comfortable grasp.

Her eyes snapped open with a rush of adrenaline. She sat up in bed and slammed a hoof on the switch of the reading lamp next to her bed, bringing light back to the room. Sweetie Belle flinched at the sudden shift in brightness but quickly blinked away the colorful dots swimming in her vision to find Fang standing a few paces away, staring at her as blankly as ever.

“I wish I could quit you,” he said with a sigh.

Sweetie Belle breathed deeply, filling her lungs until her chest felt like it would burst, and shouted: “Rarity! There’s a monster in my room!”

The sound of a pony tumbling gracelessly out of bed and banging into furniture immediately filled the house. A door down the hall opened with a slam, and within moments Rarity burst into the room with a baseball bat held in the glow of her magic. In her haste to fly to her sister’s defense, Rarity had forgotten to remove her sleeping mask, but that didn’t stop her from flailing her bat about the room in search of the intruder.

The bat swung around in wide, desperate arcs, cracking against furniture and walls, knocking over lamps and picture frames, and generally hitting everything in the room except Sweetie Belle and Fang. Every swing was accompanied by a dainty little grunt or a “Hup!” of effort.

After a minute or so, Rarity stood in the middle of the destroyed room, panting breathlessly and wiping a sheen of sweat from her forehead. “D-did I… did I get him…?” she wheezed as she lifted her sleeping mask and blinked in the shine of the desk lamp that had somehow remained unscathed.

“Let’s just say that if the monster was a piñata, nopony would be eating any candy today,” Sweetie Belle informed her snarkily.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Ms. Rarity,” Fang said with a polite dip of his head. “My name is Fang Coven, and I’m in Sweetie Belle’s class.”

The bat fell to the carpet with a thud as Rarity giggled involuntarily. “Oh my, you are very good looking, aren’t you?” she said as she felt the heat rise in her cheeks. “Oh my, did I say that out loud?”

Sweetie Belle clapped her hooves together loudly to get her sister’s attention. “Rarity, stop ogling the monster and focus,” she said commandingly.

“Oh, uhm… what are you doing here?” Rarity managed to ask after taking a moment to gather her wits about her.

“I just came to see Sweetie Belle,” Fang said lovingly as he turned to gaze at the object of his affection. “But she’s completely right. I am a monster – a vampire. I’m a dangerous predator that feeds on the blood of the living. I know I should stay away, but there’s something about her… She’s just so irresistibly beautiful. The sound of her voice is like the whisper of the winds through a field of wheat. Her eyes are fiercer than a thousand suns. And the gentle curve of her flank would make the classical sculptors of old throw down their chisels and weep at their inability to capture even an ounce of her beauty.”

Rarity’s entire body was flushed pink with the fierceness of her blush. She trotted out of the room without a word and shut the door gently, only to open it a second later and peek her head in for one last look at Fang before she ducked back out.

“Your poorly written, hackneyed flattery may have won over my sister’s romance-addled brain, creature, but I’m not buying it,” Sweetie Belle said with a scowl.

“Everything I said I said from the heart,” Fang explained emotionlessly. “In all my two-hundred years, I’ve never met somepony like you.”

Sweetie Belle’s eyes went wide as that last sentence echoed disturbingly in her head.

In all my two-hundred years…

All my two-hundred years…

Two-hundred years…

Two-hundred years!

She shivered uncontrollably – and not from the cold. Bile rose in her throat, threatening to bring her dinner up with it, but she managed to choke it back down.

The door opened again, just a crack, allowing something small to float into the room before Rarity closed the door and locked it from the other side with a tweak of her magic. Fang and Sweetie Belle looked down at the strip of condoms that had been tossed into the locked room with them.

Fang’s mouth spread into a wide, predatory grin as he pointed a hoof at the strip of prophylactics. “Should I…?” he asked hopefully.

“Get out of my room, you creepy old foal-diddler!” she shrieked.

“Alright, alright,” Fang muttered in disappointment as he trudged to the window and climbed out, despite her room being on the second story. “I get it, not on the first date.”

“Get out!!!”

* * *

The next morning, after a restless night of sleeping with one eye open, Sweetie Belle leapt out of bed and stormed out of her room. She stomped angrily down the stairs, through the living room, and into the kitchen where she knew Rarity would be having her morning coffee.

“Good morning, Sweetie Belle,” Rarity greeted with a smirk. “I trust you had a pleasant evening?”

Sweetie Belle climbed onto a chair and slammed the unused roll of condoms on the table angrily. “Condoms? Really!?”

Rarity quirked an eyebrow curiously and ran her hoof around the edge of her coffee cup in thought. “Were they too small?” she asked with an odd sort of excitement in her voice.

“They’re dragon-sized,” Sweetie Belle snapped.

“Too big, then?” Rarity asked with a hint of disappointment.

“I know you’re trying to be all permissive or whatever, trying to be a ‘cool big sister’,” Sweetie Belle said as she glowered at her legal guardian pro tem, “but I tell you there’s a monster in my room and you bring us condoms?”

“Well, when I was your age…” Rarity mumbled the rest of whatever she said into her cup as she lifted it to her lips. Whatever she’d said must have been juicy, judging from the blush it brought to her cheeks.

“He’s a creepy monster.”

“A very handsome creepy monster,” Rarity corrected.

“He’s two-hundred years old!”

Rarity cooed with interest. “Oooooo, an older boy. I must say, he looks very good for his age. Maybe I should become a vampire. It would make certain… things… easier.”

“I continue to not believe what I’m hearing,” Sweetie Belle muttered into her hooves.

She jumped off the chair and headed back towards the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Rarity called after her. “Don’t you want breakfast?”

“I’m going to get my bag and I’m going to school early,” Sweetie Belle informed her. She paused at the doorway and turned to shoot one last frown at her sister. “Can I just say how disappointed I am that my sister – my fully grown adult sister – is taking such an interest in what would actually be an incredibly inappropriately sexualized relationship between two children?”

Rarity’s head snapped around to look at her sister with a look of confusion on her face. “Did you say something, Sweetie? I was busy thinking about the intensity of Fang’s eyes…”

“I said I’m going to school,” Sweetie Belle said with a sigh of defeat.

* * *

Sweetie Belle didn’t go to school.

She’d waited in the spot where Scootaloo and Apple Bloom usually met up with her, and upon their arrival immediately told them that they had to have an emergency Cutie Mark Crusaders meeting of Alpha-Orion-Epsilon priority. Such a meeting had never been called before, or even classified, but she figured it would at least sound important enough to convince the other two girls to ditch school with her.

Sadly, it hadn’t been enough to convince them to risk getting into further trouble this week. So she sat alone on a park bench, nursing a smoothie and wondering what she could do to solve her problem.

Everypony was convinced that Fang was harmless, but she knew better. She knew what he really was: a perverted old foal-touching creeper skeeving on sexy little fillies. What would somepony that old even be doing going to school? Was he keeping up the charade just because he looked like a foal her age? It couldn’t possibly be something that stupid. Did they not have home-schooling two-hundred years ago?

Her train of thought was interrupted as she felt something wet press against the back of her neck. The wetness was accompanied by the distinct and unmistakable sound of somepony inhaling deeply. The air being sucked into the pervert's nostrils tickled the back of her neck uncomfortably.

“Mmmm, smelled you from all the way across town…”

Sweetie Belle threw her smoothie to the ground and whirled around to glare furiously at the masher. “Dangit, Fang! I said to stop that!”

To her surprise, her attacker wasn’t the pale-coated vampire from school, it was a chocolate-brown colt with a propeller beanie sitting atop his head. The colt was standing up, leaning against the backrest of the bench, his neck still craned forward in sniffing position.

Button Mash blinked in confusion as Sweetie Belle yelled at him. “Who’s Fang?” he asked confusedly.

“Oh, it’s you,” Sweetie Belle said with a sad laugh. “It’s actually really nice to see you, Button. I thought you were the new colt in class.”

Button frowned at that. “And this new colt’s been sniffing you?” he asked jealously.

“Bleh, it’s a whole thing,” she answered with a wave of her hoof.

“Speaking of class, why aren’t you there? It’s a school day today.”

“Once again, it’s a whole thing. Long story. Why aren’t you in class?”

He shrugged. “I just got back from visiting my grandpa. Mom still needed to buy school supplies and stuff for me, so she said I could just relax today.”

“Miss Cheerilee did say you were going to be a few days late,” Sweetie Belle mused.

Button Mash’s mouth curved into a cocksure grin. He snickered coolly and brushed the loose bangs from his eyes. “Yeah, I needed a few extra days to pick up your presents.”

Sweetie Belle’s ears perked happily. “You got me presents?” she asked excitedly. Button Mash may have been mildly creepy, but he was a friend, and she was glad to see him, and presents were awesome.

“I sure did,” he said as he dropped behind the bench and slowly pranced out from behind cover.

Sweetie Belle gasped as he came into view. The Button she knew was a hopeless video game junkie that would rather waste away in his bedroom than ever set foot in a gym, but here he was, bulked up and muscled like Big Macintosh. He was a few inches taller now, and he was thicker… everywhere.

“I got you a couple of pythons,” he said proudly. He reared up and flexed every muscle in his body while hissing like a serpent. The pose brought definition to the thick, ropey muscles, making them stand out almost mesmerizingly.

Sweetie Belle wiped the small bit of drool from the side of her mouth and tried to think unsexy thoughts long enough to restart her brain. “What the hay happened to you?” she finally managed to spit out.

“I got swollen,” he said as he continued to flex, now cycling through a variety of bodybuilding poses designed to accentuate different muscle groups.

“But how?” she asked, not really understanding how he could go from a twenty pound weakling to somepony that looked like he could wrestle a hydra.

Button sat down and scratched his head in thought. “Truth be told I didn’t actually workout or anything… I’m not supposed to tell anypony, but I guess it’s okay to tell you. I’m a werewolf.”

Sweetie Belle stared, slack-jawed, absolutely dumbfounded. “Excuse?”

“Well I found out that my mom is half buffalo, so I went to go visit with my grandpa this summer,” he began to explain as he lovingly caressed his own bicep. “Turns out that I’m descended from a long line of werewolves. I was finally old enough to take hold of my lycanthropic heritage, so that’s what I did this summer. Apparently turning into a wolf is better than getting a gym membership.”

“You’re part buffalo.”

“Correct.”

“And a werewolf.”

“That is also correct.”

“You’re a buffawolf.”

“Ehhhh, more like a wereffalo,” he corrected with a shake of his head. “But I’m also a pony, so… werefallony…?”

Sweetie Belle trotted back to the bench and laid on her back, staring up at the sky and resisting the urge to curl into a ball until somepony came to take her home.

“This is just great,” she muttered to the dark, overcast sky. “First it was vampires, now Ponyville’s got werewolves. What’s next, sexy mummies?”

Button Mash’s ears went flat against his head and the hackles along his spine rose threateningly. “What was that about vampires?”

“Fang, the new guy,” Sweetie Belle explained, not yet noticing the shift in attitude. “He’s a vampire. He’s in love with me or something, but it’s super gross and he won’t take a hint.”

Button Mash began growling angrily, baring his sharper than normal teeth menacingly. “There’s a vampire here? And he’s been sniffing you!?”

Sweetie Belle sat up and tilted her head in confusion at Button’s reaction. “Yeah…?”

“Werewolves and vampires have been at war for centuries!” Button Mash declared with a stamp of his hoof. “We hate each other!”

Sweetie Belle smiled and tapped her hooves together as the gears in her mind began turning, formulating a cunning plan to end all cunning plans.

“You don’t say…?”

* * *

“Okay, when he comes out of class you’re going to beat him up.”

“I like this plan,” Button Mash said. “It’s cunning. It’s a cunning plan.”

A few minutes later the bell rang, signaling the end of class. Not long after, children began filing out of the small schoolhouse, only to stop as they found Sweetie Belle and Button Mash standing side by side at the far end of the playground. The children began gossiping about what could be going on, as everypony in class knew that Sweetie Belle had ditched, and Button Mash was supposed to still be on vacation. It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn towards Button’s new appearance. More than one filly in the crowd was heard to squeal in girlish appreciation of his physique.

Finally, as the last of the students exited the building, Fang came into view.

He almost managed a smile when he saw Sweetie Belle, but then he saw who was standing at her side. His nostrils flared as he caught the scent of wet dog, a sure sign that he was dealing with his kind’s oldest enemy: a werewolf.

He narrowed his eyes and stalked forward with feline grace that complimented his lithe body. He hissed as his teeth grew until the viciously sharp little points jutted out from between his thin, reedy lips.

Button Mash likewise strode towards his quarry. Every step was confident and sure, and every inch of him radiated with primal, barely restrained power. His own canines became more pronounced and his coat became longer – shaggy, like a wild animal’s.

The pair of supernatural predators came together, nose-to-nose, and each stared the other down with a glare as cold and deadly as steel.

“Vampire,” Button Mash snarled.

“Werewolf,” Fang hissed.

“Your days of bloodsucking are over, you filthy parasite.”

“That’s big talk coming from a flea-bitten, ass-sniffing little puppy like you.”

Button Mash gave a hard shove. “You must think you’re real tough, breaking into a filly’s room to watch her sleep, you disgusting coward!”

Fang shoved back. “That’s between me and Sweetie Belle, you over-muscled cretin!”

Shove. “Lilly-white sissy!”

Shove. “Steroid abusing crotch-licker!”

Shove! “Pompous, glorified zombie!”

Shove! “I’ve had enough of you!”

“Yeah, well do something about it, then!” Button Mash challenged.

The assembled crowd shrieked in panic as Fang leapt forward with his otherworldly speed and strength. The two monstrous combatants rolled along the grass, tussling and wrestling for dominance.

“Get him! Get him!” Sweetie Belle cheered.

“What’s going on here!?” Cheerilee demanded as she ran outside, summoned by the commotion and shouting. She watched in stunned silence with the rest of the crowd as two of her students rolled around on the ground, obviously in the midst of a fight, but also displaying such savagery and power that she dared not get between them.

Finally, it seemed that two-hundred years of experience won out over raw strength and willpower. Everypony gasped as Fang pinned Button Mash to the ground. Fang leaned in to issue a deadly bite to his opponent’s neck.

The screams of terror quickly began to die out as they all realized that Fang’s mouth wasn’t at Button’s neck – it was pressed firmly against Button’s mouth.

They were kissing.

Passionately.

With their tongues.

“I’m so turned on right now,” Fang said as he gasped for air.

“Sweetie Belle never said you were so damned gorgeous,” Button complimented as he reversed their positions, pressing himself down onto Fang to return the favor and renew their kissing.

The spectators had a variety of reactions. The colts, for the vast majority, simply shared a look of discomfort and excused themselves quickly. Half the fillies fainted dead away on the spot, their faces flushed bright red. The other half of the fillies, the remaining boys, and oddly enough Cheerilee, simply stared, squealing shrilly and biting their hooves as they watched the two beautiful colts go at it.

“I think I just discovered my fetish…” Scootaloo said as her wings twitched excitedly.

Apple Bloom nodded. “Now all them comic books under AJ’s bed suddenly make sense…”

“What comic books?” Scootaloo asked without taking her eyes off the action.

“She’s got a bunch of comics with funny squiggly writin’ and pretty fellas kissin’ on each other…”

“Dude! You gotta show me!”

“Not... just right now… later…”

Sweetie Belle sighed and began to walk home. “Oh well, guess that still solves the problem for me,” she said with a relieved grin.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

Sweetie Belle froze as the tone of Cheerilee’s voice registered in her head. The older mare was glaring at her as intensely as she could without taking her eyes off the noisily sloppy make-out session playing out next to the jungle gym.

“Seems to me a naughty little filly skipped class today,” Cheerilee said sternly as she pointed a hoof in the direction of the classroom. “Detention. March.”

Sweetie Belle hung her head sadly. “Dangit… I should’ve moved to Las Pegasus…”

* * *

Author's Note

Disclaimer: I have never read the Twilight books, nor have I ever seen the movies. All parody in this story is based on second-hand accounts and any resemblance to the source material is purely coincidental.

Although I'm pretty sure I got the ending right. It's almost word-for-word how that series finished, isn't it?

I hope you enjoyed the Spooktacular and thanks for reading! I hope you have a safe and fun Halloween and that you'll join me for my next dumb story! Please be excited!